ITVS, the Independent
Television Service, has made possible the presentation the following special
series of documentaries on Link TV. ITVS, which this year celebrates a
decade of "public television for a change", seeks to create and promote
independent media that will expand civic participation by bringing new
voices and expressiveness into the public discourse.
A pioneer in public media for under-served audiences, ITVS was created
by an act of Congress in response to the lack of diverse programming and
viewpoints in public television. ITVS works exclusively with independently-produced
programs - programs that engage creative risks, advance issues and represent
points of view not usually seen on television.
In its first decade, ITVS producers have created more documentary programming
than any other public broadcasting station or production group in America
and have won every major journalism and documentary award in the process.
With award-winning narratives, children's programs, mixed-genre pieces
and interstitial shorts, ITVS has transformed and revitalized the relationship
between the public and public television.
These programs normally air on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings.
THE SERIES - to date
Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation
An examination of the circumstances surrounding the illegal overthrow of
the Hawaiian sovereignty in 1893 and Hawaii's subsequent annexation by the
U.S., and its impact from a native
Hawaiian perspective. The film is a chilling account of an episode of
U.S. history that has been largely forgotten by most mainland Americans.
Produced by the Center
for Hawaiian Studies, Haunani-Kay
Trask and Lilikala
Kame'eleihiwa.
Presented by ITVS
Convoy to Moldova
A
fast-moving and heartbreaking film that leads us straight to hell and back.
In 1999, in response to a call for help from Moldova,
a Northern Irish non-governmental organization specializing in humanitarian
action sent a convoy to the former Soviet republic wedged between Romania
and the Ukraine. An orphanage housing over 200 abandoned children was in
a desperate state. Food and medicine were scarce, and there was no heating,
health care or education. The children with physical and mental disabilities
were left to look after themselves. The volunteers accompanying the convoy
were ordinary people with little or no experience in this kind of humanitarian
work, and their efforts to distribute food and medicine were initially impeded
by local corruption and bureaucratic incompetence. After a year of struggle
and several trips back to the orphanage, persistence began to pay off and
the childrens' rediscovered smiles are the best reward. Produced by Julia
Jakobek for the BBC. For more information, click
here.
Presented by ITVS
Death by Design In
an unusual marriage of art and science, DEATH BY DESIGN takes viewers on
a fantastic journey through a remarkable terrain. Its destination: the land
of cells. In this invisible world, cells communicate with each other, work
together, reproduce, and die, all to benefit the larger organism of which
they are part. DEATH BY DESIGN is a guided tour through this invisible world,
told through a collage of metaphors. State-of-the-art micro-cinematography
is playfully intercut with parallel images from life at the human scale:
a hundred lighted violins, imploding skyscrapers and pieces of film on the
cutting room floor. Well grounded factually, the program contains interviews
with noted biologists including Rita
Levi-Montalcini, a programmed-cell-death pioneer and winner of the 1986
Nobel Prize for Medicine. DEATH BY DESIGN is anything but a dull science
film. It is one which, in the words of co-director Friedman, should be seen
by "everyone with cells!" For more information about this film, click
here. Produced and directed by Peter Friedman & Jean-Fran�ois Brunet.
Presented by ITVS
Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
This
extraordinary documentary takes viewers into India's largest prison - known
as one of the toughest in the world - and shows the dramatic change brought
about by the introduction of Vipassana meditation. This is the story of
a strong woman named Kiran Bedi, the former Inspector General of Prisons
in New Delhi, and how she strove to transform the notorious Tihar
Prison, once a hellhole of crime, into an oasis of peace. It is a story
of an ancient meditation technique, Vipassana, which helps people to take
control of their lives and channel them towards their own good and the good
of others. But most of all, it is the story of the prison inmates who underwent
profound change and realized that incarceration can be the beginning of
a new life. Produced & Directed by Ayelet
Menahemi and Eilona
Ariel, Karuna Films,
Ltd.
Presented by ITVS
Falun Gong's Challenge to China What
is Falun
Gong and why has it attracted over 100 million practitioners worldwide?
Followers call it a spiritual practice. However, in October 2000, the Chinese
government branded the Falun Gong "counter-revolutionaries," bent on overthrowing
the government and undermining socialism. The crackdown has resulted in
over 50,000 arrests, pervasive torture of incarcerated practitioners, 120
deaths, and the burning of 8 million books. What is it that China's leaders
fear? The film also questions why horrible abuses against people who have
committed no crimes have occurred with little condemnation from the U.S
government. Directed by Emmy Award-winning producer Danny
Schechter.
Presented by ITVS
Father Roy - Inside the School of
the Assassins The
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation (formerly
the U.S. Army School of the Americas) in Fort Benning, GA had the nefarious
reputation of being the place in the United States where the worst human
rights abusers in the Western Hemisphere came to learn and teach military
tactics. FATHER
ROYcombines explosive, previously unreported information about torture
training at Fort Benning with the extraordinary life and experiences of
Father
Roy Bourgeois, the daring activist who is leading the campaign to close
down the school. Narrated by Susan Sarandon. Produced by Robert
Richter.
Presented by ITVS
Fire And Water The
extraordinary story of Dr. Hussain Shahristani, once Iraq's chief nuclear
scientist and now its foremost dissident. In 1980, after refusing to help
build a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein, Shahristani was banished for life
to Baghdad's infamous Abu Graib prison. During his eleven-year imprisonment
he managed to escape amid the chaos of the Gulf War. Although offered asylum
by both Britain and Canada, Shahristani and his family chose instead to
settle in Iran, where they founded an organization to monitor the ongoing
human-rights abuses in Iraq. Their reports and videos have kept the world
informed about the atrocities resulting from Saddam's secret war against
his own people, a war which, this documentary claims, has killed or displaced
more than 250,000 since 1991. Produced and directed by Shelley Saywell.
Presented by ITVS
First World Order Weaving
verit� sequences of arts and cultural expression with interviews and animation,
FIRST WORLD ORDER traces the relationships of culturally and ethnically
distinct African peoples around the world. Originating in Africa, thousands
of years before the Egyptian dynasties, remnants of the first world order
survive today as codes and symbolic language in the arts and life of many
people. In this tapestry of images and sounds, fragments gleaned from more
than three years of research on four continents illuminate an ancient community
of perceptions, practices, and values. By Philip
Mallory Jones.
Presented by ITVS
Food This
short film is the freshest slice of caustic surrealism from Jan
Svankmajer, the undisputed grand master of claymation: three courses
of delicious vignettes in which Svankmajer animates grey-suited men as human
vending machines, shows a couple at dinner devouring the contents of a restaurant,
and takes us on a tour of a graphic and disturbing cannibalistic banquet.
For more information about this fascinating film, click
here.
Presented by ITVS
Good Kurds, Bad Kurds A
story that the national press wouldn't touch: a campaign of ethnic cleansing
perpetrated against Kurdish minorities by the Turkish military, using U.S.-made
weapons. This independently produced film -- nine years in the making --
delves deeply into the U.S.'s complicity in this human rights disaster,
indicting the mainstream news outlets that, by staying quiet, helped perpetuate
the violence. Shot, in part, by three-time Academy Award winner Haskell
Wexler, "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds" travels from Santa Barbara, home to a small
Kurdish refugee community, to Washington D.C., where an activist struggles
to gain the attention of lawmakers and the media and fight his deportation,
and to Turkey, where the anti-Kurd campaign continues. For more information
on the Kurdish minority in Turkey, please visit Human
Rights Watch. Produced and directed by Kevin
McKiernan.
Presented by ITVS
A Healthy Baby Girl In
1963, Judith Helfand's mother was prescribed DES (a synthetic hormone) to
prevent miscarriage. But technology is rarely a benign midwife. At age 25,
Judith was diagnosed with DES-related cervical cancer and had a radical
hysterectomy. She went home to heal and picked up her video camera. Told
with humor, warmth and intimacy, this is a DES daughter's diary about "wonder
drugs" and rude awakenings. Produced and directed by Judith
Helfand. For more, please click here.
Presented by ITVS
It Takes a Child: Craig Kielburger's
Journey Into the World of Child Labor
When
he was twelve, Craig Kielburger read a newspaper report about the murder
of a liberated child laborer in Pakistan who had been working to free other
youngsters from bonded labor. Reading the article changed Craig's life:
he went on a seven-week trip to South Asia to find out for himself about
the lives of working children. The film follows Craig from age twelve to
fifteen, showing how he has used international acclaim to fight for the
rights of working children around the world and put the issue of child labor
on the international agenda. Kielburger helped found Free
the Children, an organization dedicated to the elimination of the bonded
labor of young people. Produced and directed by Judy Jackson.
Presented by ITVS
Justice in the Coalfields Examines
the community and family toll surrounding the 1989 strike against the Pittston
Coal Co. in Virginia, West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, its effects on
the rank-and-file miners, and on neighbors, shopkeepers, sons and daughters,
both united and divided. By Anne
Lewis and Appalshop,
the Kentucky media, arts and culture center.
Presented by ITVS
Kontum Diary: The Journey Home For
25 years, a Vietnam War veteran, Paul Reed, has been haunted by his stint
in combat, never fully able to overcome the atrocities he experienced in
Vietnam. When he finally reads a Vietnamese soldier's diary he had found
during the war, Reed is deeply moved by his enemy's humanity. In search
of healing, he journeys back to Vietnam to return the diary to its author,
Nguyen Van Nghia. Together the two veterans travel to the battleground where
they once tried to kill each other and, in the process, confront painful
memories. Produced by Stevan Smith and Phil Sturholm. For more, please click
here.
Presented by ITVS
Made in India This
powerful documentary is a portrait of India's Self-Employed
Women's Association, the now-famous women's organization that holds
to the simple yet radical belief that poor women need organizing, not welfare.
Based in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, SEWA is at its core a trade
union for the self-employed. It offers union membership to the illiterate
women who sell vegetables for 50 cents a day in the city markets, or who
pick up paper scraps for recycling from the streets--jobs that most Indian
men don't consider real work. Following the lives of six women involved
in the organization, including Ela R. Bhat, its visionary founder, the documentary
is an important look at the power of grassroots global feminism. Directed
by Patricia
Plattner.
Presented by ITVS
New Cop on the Beat A
cop's eye view at the pioneering New Haven community policing program. In
this Eastern Seaboard city, foundering under the burdens of joblessness
and crime, police are changing the mission and mandate of law enforcement.
The film follows three police officers through their daily duties dealing
with the problems of their fragmented communities with new and compassionate
principles. Co-produced by Carole Lucia Satrina and Eugene Marner. For more,
please click here.
Presented by ITVS
Nu Shu : A Hidden Language of Women
in China
In
feudal China, women were denied educational opportunities and condemned
to social isolation. But in Jian-yong County, in Hunan province, peasant
women miraculously developed a separate written language, called Nu Shu,
meaning "female writing." Believing women to be inferior, men disregarded
this new script, and it remained unknown for centuries. This engrossing
documentary revolves around the filmmaker's discovery of eighty-six-year-old
Huan-yi Yang, the only living resident of the area still able to read and
write Nu Shu. Exploring Nu Shu customs and their role in women's lives,
the film uncovers a women's subculture born of resistance to male dominance,
finds a parallel struggle in the resistance of Yao minorities to Confucian
Han Chinese culture, and traces Nu Shu's origins to ancient Yao customs
that fostered women's creativity. Directed by Yue-Qing
Yang.
Presented by ITVS
Pepper's Pow Wow A
captivating portrait of the life and influence of Native American jazz
saxophone pioneer Jim Pepper. Always in the vanguard, Pepper is remembered
for his soaring tone and as a musician who played with the giants of jazz
including Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman and Keith Jarrett,
and on the renowned stages of Europe. A unique talent, Pepper merged his
musical roots as a Creek/Kaw Indian with his passion for jazz to form
a unique fusion that continues to inspire. More than 10 years in the making,
this remarkable and intimate portrait breaks stereotypes by covering fresh
ground, and views Pepper's life as a metaphor for many indigenous people
who are struggling to walk in two worlds with one spirit. For a biography
and detailed discography of Jim Pepper, click here.
Produced by Sandra
Sunrising Osawa.
Presented by ITVS
Prisoners of Hope A
compelling look at suffering and strength of South African political prisoners.
The film documents the 1995 reunion and return of 1,250 former political
prisoners to the notorious Robben
Island prison -- led by President Nelson Mandela. Directed by Danny
Schecter and Barbara
Kopple.
Presented by ITVS
Struggles in Steel: A Story of African
American Steel Workers
A moving examination of the 100-year struggle by African-American steelworkers
for equal rights in the mills. Combining archival footage and frank interviews
with dozens of workers, the documentary paints an uncompromising picture
of how one culture was hit especially hard by the steel industry's collapse.
For
more. Produced and directed by Anthony
Buba and Raymond Henderson.
Presented by ITVS
Vietnam: A Long time Coming In
January 1998, Kartemquin Films traveled to present day Vietnam to document
the unfathomable: the uniting of former sworn enemies, groups of American
and Vietnamese veterans, for an arduous 16 day, 1,200 mile bicycle expedition
through the heart of Vietnam. The Vietnam Challenge bicycling team, composed
of persons with and without disabilities, included world-renown athletes
Greg LeMond and Diana Nyad. Organized by World
T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports, the Challenge became
a three-week journey of discovery, an opening to the past and present of
Vietnam. Produced by Kartemquin
Films. For more information, please click
here.
Presented by ITVS
In
an unusual marriage of art and science, DEATH BY DESIGN takes viewers on
a fantastic journey through a remarkable terrain. Its destination: the land
of cells. In this invisible world, cells communicate with each other, work
together, reproduce, and die, all to benefit the larger organism of which
they are part. DEATH BY DESIGN is a guided tour through this invisible world,
told through a collage of metaphors. State-of-the-art micro-cinematography
is playfully intercut with parallel images from life at the human scale:
a hundred lighted violins, imploding skyscrapers and pieces of film on the
cutting room floor. Well grounded factually, the program contains interviews
with noted biologists including Rita
Levi-Montalcini, a programmed-cell-death pioneer and winner of the 1986
Nobel Prize for Medicine. DEATH BY DESIGN is anything but a dull science
film. It is one which, in the words of co-director Friedman, should be seen
by "everyone with cells!" For more information about this film, click
here. Produced and directed by Peter Friedman & Jean-Fran�ois Brunet.
What
is Falun
Gong and why has it attracted over 100 million practitioners worldwide?
Followers call it a spiritual practice. However, in October 2000, the Chinese
government branded the Falun Gong "counter-revolutionaries," bent on overthrowing
the government and undermining socialism. The crackdown has resulted in
over 50,000 arrests, pervasive torture of incarcerated practitioners, 120
deaths, and the burning of 8 million books. What is it that China's leaders
fear? The film also questions why horrible abuses against people who have
committed no crimes have occurred with little condemnation from the U.S
government. Directed by Emmy Award-winning producer Danny
Schechter.
The
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation (formerly
the U.S. Army School of the Americas) in Fort Benning, GA had the nefarious
reputation of being the place in the United States where the worst human
rights abusers in the Western Hemisphere came to learn and teach military
tactics. FATHER
ROYcombines explosive, previously unreported information about torture
training at Fort Benning with the extraordinary life and experiences of
Father
Roy Bourgeois, the daring activist who is leading the campaign to close
down the school. Narrated by Susan Sarandon. Produced by Robert
Richter.
The
extraordinary story of Dr. Hussain Shahristani, once Iraq's chief nuclear
scientist and now its foremost dissident. In 1980, after refusing to help
build a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein, Shahristani was banished for life
to Baghdad's infamous Abu Graib prison. During his eleven-year imprisonment
he managed to escape amid the chaos of the Gulf War. Although offered asylum
by both Britain and Canada, Shahristani and his family chose instead to
settle in Iran, where they founded an organization to monitor the ongoing
human-rights abuses in Iraq. Their reports and videos have kept the world
informed about the atrocities resulting from Saddam's secret war against
his own people, a war which, this documentary claims, has killed or displaced
more than 250,000 since 1991. Produced and directed by Shelley Saywell.
Weaving
verit� sequences of arts and cultural expression with interviews and animation,
FIRST WORLD ORDER traces the relationships of culturally and ethnically
distinct African peoples around the world. Originating in Africa, thousands
of years before the Egyptian dynasties, remnants of the first world order
survive today as codes and symbolic language in the arts and life of many
people. In this tapestry of images and sounds, fragments gleaned from more
than three years of research on four continents illuminate an ancient community
of perceptions, practices, and values. By Philip
Mallory Jones.
This
short film is the freshest slice of caustic surrealism from Jan
Svankmajer, the undisputed grand master of claymation: three courses
of delicious vignettes in which Svankmajer animates grey-suited men as human
vending machines, shows a couple at dinner devouring the contents of a restaurant,
and takes us on a tour of a graphic and disturbing cannibalistic banquet.
For more information about this fascinating film, click
here. 
A
story that the national press wouldn't touch: a campaign of ethnic cleansing
perpetrated against Kurdish minorities by the Turkish military, using U.S.-made
weapons. This independently produced film -- nine years in the making --
delves deeply into the U.S.'s complicity in this human rights disaster,
indicting the mainstream news outlets that, by staying quiet, helped perpetuate
the violence. Shot, in part, by three-time Academy Award winner Haskell
Wexler, "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds" travels from Santa Barbara, home to a small
Kurdish refugee community, to Washington D.C., where an activist struggles
to gain the attention of lawmakers and the media and fight his deportation,
and to Turkey, where the anti-Kurd campaign continues. For more information
on the Kurdish minority in Turkey, please visit Human
Rights Watch. Produced and directed by Kevin
McKiernan.
Examines
the community and family toll surrounding the 1989 strike against the Pittston
Coal Co. in Virginia, West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, its effects on
the rank-and-file miners, and on neighbors, shopkeepers, sons and daughters,
both united and divided. By Anne
Lewis and Appalshop,
the Kentucky media, arts and culture center. 
For
25 years, a Vietnam War veteran, Paul Reed, has been haunted by his stint
in combat, never fully able to overcome the atrocities he experienced in
Vietnam. When he finally reads a Vietnamese soldier's diary he had found
during the war, Reed is deeply moved by his enemy's humanity. In search
of healing, he journeys back to Vietnam to return the diary to its author,
Nguyen Van Nghia. Together the two veterans travel to the battleground where
they once tried to kill each other and, in the process, confront painful
memories. Produced by Stevan Smith and Phil Sturholm. For more, please click
here.
This
powerful documentary is a portrait of India's Self-Employed
Women's Association, the now-famous women's organization that holds
to the simple yet radical belief that poor women need organizing, not welfare.
Based in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, SEWA is at its core a trade
union for the self-employed. It offers union membership to the illiterate
women who sell vegetables for 50 cents a day in the city markets, or who
pick up paper scraps for recycling from the streets--jobs that most Indian
men don't consider real work. Following the lives of six women involved
in the organization, including Ela R. Bhat, its visionary founder, the documentary
is an important look at the power of grassroots global feminism. Directed
by Patricia
Plattner.
A
cop's eye view at the pioneering New Haven community policing program. In
this Eastern Seaboard city, foundering under the burdens of joblessness
and crime, police are changing the mission and mandate of law enforcement.
The film follows three police officers through their daily duties dealing
with the problems of their fragmented communities with new and compassionate
principles. Co-produced by Carole Lucia Satrina and Eugene Marner. For more,
please click here.
A
captivating portrait of the life and influence of Native American jazz
saxophone pioneer Jim Pepper. Always in the vanguard, Pepper is remembered
for his soaring tone and as a musician who played with the giants of jazz
including Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman and Keith Jarrett,
and on the renowned stages of Europe. A unique talent, Pepper merged his
musical roots as a Creek/Kaw Indian with his passion for jazz to form
a unique fusion that continues to inspire. More than 10 years in the making,
this remarkable and intimate portrait breaks stereotypes by covering fresh
ground, and views Pepper's life as a metaphor for many indigenous people
who are struggling to walk in two worlds with one spirit. For a biography
and detailed discography of Jim Pepper, click here.
Produced by Sandra
Sunrising Osawa.
In
January 1998, Kartemquin Films traveled to present day Vietnam to document
the unfathomable: the uniting of former sworn enemies, groups of American
and Vietnamese veterans, for an arduous 16 day, 1,200 mile bicycle expedition
through the heart of Vietnam. The Vietnam Challenge bicycling team, composed
of persons with and without disabilities, included world-renown athletes
Greg LeMond and Diana Nyad. Organized by World
T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports, the Challenge became
a three-week journey of discovery, an opening to the past and present of
Vietnam. Produced by Kartemquin
Films. For more information, please click
here.
