Blog

February, 8, 2011

When I Rise

Independent Lens

A gifted black music student at the University of Texas is thrust into a civil-rights storm that changes her life forever. Barbara Smith Conrad is cast in an opera to co-star with a white male classmate, fueling a racist backlash…
A Haitian boy stands in a water-logged slum.
January, 11, 2011

Children of Haiti

Independent Lens

In the midst of Haiti’s lush mountains and historical relics, hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned children wander the streets day and night. Known as the Sanguine (“Soulless”) and forgotten by their own people, they struggled for survival even…
November, 9, 2010

The Longoria Affair

Independent Lens

Sixty years ago in Three Rivers, Texas, the only funeral home in town refused to hold a wake for Felix Longoria, a decorated Mexican American soldier killed in battle during World War II. Longoria’s widow was told, simply, “The whites…
Hannah Senesh (Meri Roth) and her mother Catherine (Marcela Nohýnková) circle a prison courtyard
April, 13, 2010

Blessed Is the Match

Independent Lens

At age 22, Hannah Senesh parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in an effort to save the Jews of Hungary. As a poet and diarist, she left behind a body of work that has inspired generations. Narrated by Academy Award nominee Joan…
March, 23, 2010

Lost Souls (Animas Perdidas)

Independent Lens

A young Latina filmmaker chronicles the emotional journey of her uncle, a U.S. military vet deported to Mexico, and uncovers the secrets of her family’s past, when they had to start over and forge new lives in an unfamiliar “homeland.”
February, 23, 2010

Behind the Rainbow

Independent Lens

Can the deal between South Africa’s old apartheid regime and its new government withstand the test of time? The film explores the transition of the ANC, from a liberation organization into South Africa’s ruling party, through the evolution of the…
A closeup of a man standing in a Catholic church
December, 29, 2009

Scenes from a Parish

Independent Lens

Lawrence, Massachusetts is a New England textile town that was founded by Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Potato Famine. Subsequent waves of immigrants from Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, and Canada flooded in through the decades, providing labor for the wool…
Two miners in hardhats
October, 20, 2009

Butte, America

Independent Lens

As Thomas Edison prepared to throw the switch that would signal the dawn of the electric age, an epic story was unfolding in the copper-rich mountains of Montana. Butte, America chronicles the rise and fall of a small mining town with…
Banner with pictures of the Argentine disappeared carried by relatives
September, 21, 2009

Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos

Independent Lens

Like many modern-day quests, Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos starts with an innocent search on Google. But what begins with filmmaker Juan Mandelbaum’s mild curiosity about a former college sweetheart soon leads to a gripping personal journey into a world of brutality, repression,…
June, 16, 2009

Ask Not

Independent Lens

This film exposes the tangled political battles that led to DADT and examines the societal shifts that have occurred since its 1993 passage. Current and veteran gay soldiers reveal how the policy has affected them during their tours of duty…
May, 26, 2009

Steal a Pencil for Me

Independent Lens

In June 1943, Ina Soep, the rich and beautiful daughter of an Amsterdam diamond cutter, met a married couple — a poor accountant named Jack Polak and his vivacious wife, Manja — at a birthday party for a friend. Six…
A group of men and women in the 1920s pose for the camera
April, 28, 2009

At Home in Utopia

Independent Lens

In the mid-1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish garment workers catapulted themselves out of the urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. Adjacent to the newly opened subway corridor…