Kashmir: An Explosive Eden

The ever-embattled territory of Kashmir in the Himalayas is again in the news, as representatives from Amnesty International arrived there this week to investigate reports of human rights abuses lodged against both Indian and Pakistani combatants. In the 21 years since the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule in the region erupted, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been killed.

Coincidentally, Project Kashmir premieres on Independent Lens tonight (check local listings). In this beautiful and cogent new show, producers Geeta Patel and Senain Kheshgi sneak their cameras into Kashmir to observe the secretive and anxious lives of the region’s inhabitants, and to look for clues to what started the conflict — which could become nuclear at any time — and how religious and national allegiances can seemingly immunize people to their own most human instincts for survival.

The filmmakers’ journey is especially moving when they find themselves pulled in separate directions by their own divergent ethnicities. Patel — an Indian American Hindu, and Kheshgi — a Pakistani American Muslim find their own friendship eroding as they begin personally identifying with opposite sides of the struggle.

Catch the film tonight on PBS, and watch this exclusive behind-the-scenes footage for a glimpse into this beautiful and deadly region >>

Tags: hindu, India, kashmir, Muslim, Pakistan

Psycho No More: Breaking the Stigma of Mental Illness

When you call someone “crazy” or “psycho,” consider this: about one in six adults and one in 10 children have a diagnosable mental illness. The stigma that clings to mental illness (and the casual use of cruel language) makes coping especially difficult for those who suffer, and can also deter them from seeking help. We’re mentioning this to mark the middle of National Mental Illness Awareness Month, and to highlight a couple of programs that address the challenges and victories for individuals and communities who have struggled with mental illness and stigma.

Mental illness is singular in a tragic way — the medical community has historically (and incorrectly) assigned blame for certain illness on its sufferers and their families — for example, autism was often blamed on cold or emotionally distant mothers from the 1950s through the 1970s (see Refrigerator Mothers, P.O.V., 2002). Such institutional failures have served to legitimize stigma in deadly ways.

That brings us to When Medicine Got it Wrong, a new co-production of ITVS and KQED/San Francisco, distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA), airing on select public television stations this month (check local listings). It is a inspirational film about a brave group of parents who rejected the prevailing medical opinion in the early 1970s that their children’s schizophrenia was the result of bad parenting. They launched a grassroots campaign that radically changed the way society cares for and medical science researches and treats mental illness of all kinds.

Stigma and discrimination almost always result from a lack of good information and too many false presumptions. Take a minute this month to reconsider your assumptions about the mentally ill.

Watch a trailer for When Medicine Got It Wrong >>

Tags: medicine, mental health, mental illness, schizophrenia

Happy Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month from ITVS

"A Village Called Versailles" airs on the PBS Series Independent Lens on May 25th

This month we’re honoring Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month at ITVS by celebrating some of the groundbreaking films by and about the API community coming up in our broadcast schedule.

With the tragic oil spill encroaching on the coast of Louisiana, the upcoming premiere of A Village Called Versailles, by S. Leo Chiang on Independent Lens on May 25 promises to be especially cogent and poignant as a story of a Vietnamese American community in New Orleans facing down a massive ecological and socioeconomic disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Versailles is the most recent production in a long collaboration between ITVS and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), with whom we have co-produced a remarkable range of penetrating films in recent years.

Other ITVS and CAAM co-productions broadcasting this month include the Emmy-winning Sentenced Home (May 16 on Global Voices), Project Kashmir (May 18 on Independent Lens), and Independent Lens Audience Award-winner China Blue (May 23 on Global Voices).

Be sure to tune in for two other shows airing this month, too — Vietnam: The Next Generation and Teacher (which is already streaming in its entirety on the PBS.org video player).

Not sure which to watch? Take a peek inside: Clips and trailers for all of the titles airing this month are available now on the new ITVS.org video player.

Watch a preview of Project Kashmir airing next Tuesday, May 18 on Independent Lens (check local listings) >>

Tags: API, Asian American, heritage, Pacific Islander

Hey Teachers! You’ll Dig This

If you’re a teacher, we know times are tough. You are struggling to enrich your classroom, but beset on all sides by budget cuts, growing class sizes, and a dearth of basic supplies. Fear not – the new ITVS.org will help you find free (yes free) standards-based resources for your classroom that will engage and inform your students in new and innovative ways.

Our newly redesigned website is now a content destination for educators and youth-serving organizations. It now hosts our complete collections of lesson plans, activities, learning games, and film modules drawn from the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens and ITVS’s Global Perspectives Project. You asked for it, and we listened: While we’ve been producing these resources for years now, the new ITVS.org website makes them more accessible and easier to use than ever.

The search and sort function in our section for educators will allow you to find the appropriate resources that align with the subject matter in your syllabus right from the landing page. And our crisp new online video player will allow you to stream film modules in your classroom right from our site.

Now you have even more options — our lesson plans are available on the site as HTML pages, you can still download them as PDFs, or get them on a DVD you can order online.

So what are you waiting for? Get your hands on our free resources and watch your students respond when they make connections between the facts in their textbooks and the films, games, and exercises we’re offering 24 hours a day.

Tags: classroom, education, Free, lesson plans, students, teachers

Sesame Street Diplomacy — Wrapping Up at the Peacebuilding Summit

ITVS Staff writer Eric Martin posted to ‘Beyond the Box’ live from the Newseum during the day’s proceedings:

The afternoon session kicked off with clips from two films: The World According to

Sesame Workshop CEO Gary Knell moderates the final panel of the day

Sesame Street, a look at the making of “muppet diplomacy” through versions of the iconic children’s show produced by local producers in other countries; and The Team, a documentary look at the Kenyan soap opera of the same title that marries conflict resolution with popular storytelling.

Moderator Gary Knell, CEO of the Sesame Workshop, carried the theme of the clips into the discussion, highlighting the importance of “indigenous” partnerships to achieve local impact.  Mburugu Gikunda, executive producer of The Team in Kenya, reinforced that idea with his story of how his work combines television, radio and local screenings as equally important to getting people to act.  “When people see it in their living rooms, they are very passive,” he said.  “When they watch it in a group, there is encouragement to one another to take some action with it.”  New media, he continued, represent new opportunities.

› Continue reading

Liveblogging, Part 2 — Storytelling 2.0

ITVS Staff writer Eric Martin posted to ‘Beyond the Box’ live from the Newseum during the day’s proceedings:

CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison set up the second panel, “Storytelling 2.0”, observing that “Mutual understanding and respect begins with someone else’s story.”  The challenge in this 21^st century media world of audiences turned media makers, she said, lies not only telling those stories but in the fact that “you have to shut up long enough to listen to someone else’s story.”  Public media is tackling these issues across radio, new media, and television, including documentaries like Project Kashmir, the ITVS-funded documentary that premieres May 18 on the PBS series Independent Lens.

Patricia Harrison, President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting addresses the leadership summit

After clips from the film were screened for the audience, moderator Jamie Tarabay asked how can films like Project Kashmir and their filmmaker promote this understanding and respect?   “When you’ve reached people and they’re moved by it” said Orlando Bagwell, director of Ford Foundation’s Freedom of Expression Program, “and they want to do something—what do you do with this moment?”   New media tools combined with storytelling open up new possibilities to engage audiences and get them to act—whether it’s giving money for Haiti relief or volunteering in their communities.

“You need time to get to know the person behind the story,” added Harrison, along with a “firewall of independence” where storytellers can speak their mind and be seen as credible and authentic.  Even then, how do you compete in the marketplace?  “We need to create material that feeds the beast,” said Project Kashmir director Geeta Patel, not simply tell stories to people who watch documentaries.  That means bringing more humor, plugging into popular formats like love stories and action movies to reach audiences who “might not read the newspaper but they watch the Terminator.” › Continue reading

Liveblogging “Media as Global Diplomat” — Seizing the Moment

ITVS Staff writer Eric Martin posted to ‘Beyond the Box’ live from the Newseum during the day’s proceedings:

The third “Media as Global Diplomat Summit” got underway at the Newseum on a bright Washington DC morning, with a mix of some 250 dark-suited power brokers and quick-typing bloggers filling the room.  The question of the day:  how can those working in conflict resolution and public interest media “seize the moment” presented by new technology and new stakeholders?

More than 300 people gathered at the Newseum's Knight Conference Center for the "Media as Global Diplomat" leadership summit

Hosts from ITVS and USIP, which co-presented the summit, opened the session by framing the day.  USIP president Dick Solomon described how “traditional notions of public diplomacy have not kept up with [new] technologies” while his colleague Sheldon Himmelfald brought to life a media world where children consume 12 hours of media every day, in a multimedia presentation that contrasted cognitive scientific data with video clips of Ohio militia calls-to-arms and optimistic journalistic partnerships in Burundi as opposing forces in the battle of peace and hate.  ITVS Sally Jo Fifer announced progress in the form of the International Documentary Exchange Act, recent legislation now moving through Congress that would support a two-way media exchange between the U.S. and other countries based on the work of the ITVS Global Perspectives Project.

The first panel, “The New News,” got underway against the backdrop of a clip from the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, funded by ITVS and slated for broadcast on P.O.V. in the summer of 2010.  Panel moderator Jamie Tarabay, the NPR correspondent who was part of the news team that won a DuPont-Colombia Award for coverage of Iraq, contrasted the age of controlled information depicted in the film with the explosion of today’s media environment, challenging the panelists to reconcile the possibilities and realities of 21^st century media. › Continue reading

Live Webcast: Media As Global Diplomat

It’s here! Welcome to the live stream of Seizing the Moment: Media and Peacebuilding, a summit we’re hosting at the Newseum in cooperation with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the Sesame Workshop. (For more about this event, check out our previous post)

Please join in via chat or by using the Twitter hashtag #magd. How do you think the media is doing in helping divergent cultures understand and empathize with one another? Is technology delivering on its promise to democratize media in a true sense? What could we be doing better?

Dive in and be heard:

Newseum streaming video requires JavaScript to work properly. To view this live stream, please enable JavaScript on your browser.

Tags: international, leadership, media, peace, public policy

Our New Website: What’s in it for ITVS Filmmakers

If you’ve been funded by ITVS, you’re already familiar with the resources we bring to bear in support of your project. The new ITVS.org takes it one step further, putting our reach and resources into your hands directly.

It’s all about leverage, and ITVS.org offers new ways to engage your audience. For the first time ever, you will be able to post your own screenings, making ITVS.org an extension of your current marketing efforts. (You should have received an email last week explaining how to post your screenings. Contact us if you need it resent.)

The new “Related Films” feature (at thew bottom of each film overview page) allows like-minded fans of other similar films to discover yours, and by linking your film’s page to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, we enable you to attract and engage these new fans, building a base you can convert when trying to fund your next project.

In addition, your film pages are also now a one-stop shop for all your promotional materials, turning ITVS.org into the perfect electronic press kit (EPK). Just point your adoring press to ITVS.org and you can be sure they receive all the info they need for that great review.

Got questions? Post them here in the comments and we’ll answer them.

Tags: documentary, film funding, filmmaker resources, filmmaking, independent films

An Epic Journey for an Autistic Boy

“…this compelling documentary presents its story via multiple access points: the subject of autism, the notion of alternative healing and the simple travelogue appeal of an excursion to remote, untamed Mongolia. The Horse Boy has the nerve to be spiritual without entering the minefield of faith, and through careful handling, could resonate strongly with underserved audiences.” –Variety

“An extraordinary journey of the heart and spirit, and a stirring testament to parenthood.”   –Los Angeles Times

How far would you travel to heal someone you love? For one Texas couple, it means a spiritual journey halfway around the world to Mongolia. When their son is diagnosed with autism, they seek the best treatments but nothing works… Until they discover their son’s connection to horses and the effect it has on him. Part travel adventure and shamanic quest, this is the story of how one family found a gateway into understanding their son’s life.

The Horse Boy premieres tonight, Tuesday, May 11 at 10:00 on Independent Lens on PBS (check local listings).

Tags: Autism, children, mongolia, parenting, shaman