Denali Tiller has been an artist, a teacher, a world traveler, and was named one of 110 “Filmmakers to Watch” by Variety, but Tre Maison Dasan happens to be her…...
By Brooke Shelby Biggs We nonfiction nerds who are compulsive documentary watchers are usually also public radio listeners and magazine readers. Who among us doesn’t have a closet full of…...
Documentarian David Garrett Byars is making his feature film debut with No Man’s Land, but he's made short films before. including Recapture, a short documentary chronicling the attempt of right-wing activists…...
Filmmaker Jamie Meltzer, also the program director of the MFA program in Documentary Film at Stanford University, has made acclaimed films about a wide collection of topics, from song-poems to…...
Watch our seven-part, Webby Award-nominated series on juvenile sentencing laws, "Sentencing Children." "Sentencing Children" was produced by Dan Birman and Independent Lens. This series is part of Independent Lens‘s commitment to…...
Independent Lens, which recently won the 2017 IDA Documentary Award for Best Curated Series from the International Documentary Association, now officially announces our March-May 2018 lineup on PBS. Dolores, Peter…...
For 40 years, the controversial community organizing group ACORN sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals, promoting government waste and ineffective activism. These competing perceptions exploded on the national stage in 2009, just as Barack Obama became president. Fueled… Read More
With unfettered access, filmmaker David Byars gives a detailed, on-the-ground account of the 2016 standoff between protesters occupying Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and federal authorities during a 41-day siege. No Man’s Land documents the occupation from inception to demise and tells the story of those… Read More
A follow-up to his acclaimed, Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Award-winning film The Waiting Room (Independent Lens, 2013), Pete Nicks' The Force is part of a trilogy of films he's making which…...
At a powder keg moment in American policing, The Force presents a fly-on-the-wall look deep inside the long-troubled Oakland Police Department as it struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson, Missouri, and an explosive sex scandal. Filmmaker… Read More
In the early 2000s, Hollywood invested in the urban fairy tale where a teacher is called into the principal’s office of a school in a low-income, broken part of town…...
They Call Us Monsters is Ben Lear's first film as director, but he's not new to the business. Yes, Ben is the son of trailblazing TV producer-writer Norman Lear of All…...