William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe

With America’s best known civil rights lawyer still fresh in everyone’s thoughts, the daughters fielded a wide range of questions from viewers. One participant asked how their father would have felt about the internet as a platform for activism. Both Emily and Sarah were convinced he would have been obsessed with following his press mentions through “Google alerts.” Read the full transcript from last night’s chat here.

Plus, watch exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from the film. Here you will see how Michelangelo’s David, an inspiration to a young William Kunstler, came to life through animation.

While China and North Korea historically have been politically and economically friendly, the increasingly erratic and provocative behavior of North Korea’s leadership has strained relations in recent years. That is precisely the story Chinese-born filmmaker Liang Zhao set out to tell when he went back to his childhood home in Dandong, situated on the border with North Korea. In his film Return to the Border, which airs beginning this Sunday on Global Voices (PBS WORLD), Liang goes back to his hometown only to find it vastly changed from his childhood decades ago. In the intervening years, North Korean President Kim Il-sung died and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il. China abandoned its isolationism and began trading with the West, further alienating its fellow communists in North Korea. North Koreans suffered a brutal famine, in which as many as 2 million died.

Liang talks Dandong residents and former North Korean citizens, and tours the border, even covertly entering North Korea to bear witness to the strange militarism of its culture and fearful behavior by its citizens. Border guards appear, and quietly ask for cigarettes and food. The film explores how borders are purely man-made barriers, and how common humanity transcends them on a daily basis.

Tune in to watch Return to the Border — premiering Sunday on Global Voices (check local listings)— for a glimpse into this controversial line on the map for context into the conflicts there that are making the news today.

The Caviar Connection airs Sunday, June 6 on Global Voices on PBS World. Check here for local listings.

You can also watch online at PBS.org.

Traditionally, the Vietnamese culture in both Vietnam and in this community’s adopted home in New Orleans reserved moral, ethical, and political leadership to the older generations. In the wake of Katrina, and now in the midst of a cataclysmic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the younger generation is proving to be an indispensible link between the English-speaking establishment and the older generations of Vietnamese immigrants who, because of a language and cultural divide, cannot effectively speak for themselves.

In this web-exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, watch how the youth in Versailles stepped into a void and organized their community to rebuild its demolished infrastructure, and then fight off a cynical political ploy to locate a toxic waste dump next to their neighborhood:

Watch A Village Called Versailles tonight on Independent Lens on PBS (check local listings).

While British Petroleum has pledged to compensate fishers who are losing their livelihoods because of the spill, the choices they offer aren’t very appetizing: fishers may file a claim for up to $5,000 for losses related to the spill, or sign up for training to do oil clean-up work. In each case, they sign waivers agreeing to never hold the company liable for future losses or injury. The problem is, all of the paperwork — and all of the training — is in English, and most of the fishers cannot read or speak English, let alone understand legal fine print. BP has not provided any Vietnamese-speaking claims personnel to connect with this demographic.

Father Vien Nguyen, who rallied his community against a toxic landfill in the months after Katrina, is fighting back against BP’s seemingly cavalier approach to this devastated local economy and the Vietnamese people who keep it alive.

Watch A Village Called Versailles featuring Father Vien’s battle against the landfill in 2005, on Independent Lens Tuesday, May 25th on PBS (Check local listings).

And watch Father Vien’s update on what’s happening in Versailles since the oil disaster began:

Father Vien Nguyen accepting the AAPCHO Community Champion Award

In February, the organization I work for, the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations (AAPCHO), at their fundraising awards gala, showed excerpts from A Village Called Versailles, and presented Father Vien Nguyen with AAPCHO’s Community Champion Award.

For those of you who are not already familiar with AAPCHO’s work, AAPCHO is a national organization representing community health centers dedicated to promoting advocacy, collaboration, and leadership that advances the health status of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders. So when my organization began having conversations about honoring a community champion, we wanted to recognize Father Vien’s work towards re-establishing primary health care services in New Orleans East post-Katrina. As chronicled in A Village Called Versailles, Father Vien’s leadership helped galvanize Vietnamese Americans in Louisiana to rebuild their region, and fight a toxic landfill that threatened the well-being and health of their community.

When ITVS learned that AAPCHO planned to honor Father Vien, they graciously loaned us a copy of the film to show at our awards ceremony. While Father Vien’s accomplishments were read by our emcee, film and television actress Tamlyn Tomita, the audience was visibly moved, as footage from the documentary was simultaneously projected on two large screens. The film punctuated the remarkable battle Father Vien and the Vietnamese American community of Versailles had fought and won to reclaim and protect their home.

Watch the trailer for A Village Called Versailes >>

From l to r: John McComas (CEO of AlohaCare), Jeff Caballero (Executive Director AAPCHO), Congressman Mike Honda, Father Vien, Dr. Regina Benjamin (U.S. Surgeon General)

As a health advocate, the documentary reminds me that the definition of healthy communities reaches beyond the ability to see a doctor for your annual check up (although that is very important too). Father Vien and the community members of Versailles recognized that environmental health is intrinsic to personal health.

A Village Called Versailles also illustrated the important point that healthy communities are empowered communities. Empowered communities are not only driven by a sense of self-preservation, but also by the principles of compassion and respect, where the voices of both the young and elderly are equally valued.

At the awards ceremony, Father Vien graciously accepted AAPCHO’s Community Champion Award presented by Congressman Joseph Cao. He was quick to highlight the hard work and advocacy of his fellow community members.

I continue to be inspired by Father Vien and the Vietnamese American community of New Orleans East. It’s my hope that many others will learn about this remarkable story, and also draw inspiration from the film, just as I have.

Grace-Sonia Melanio
AAPCHO Membership Relations Associate

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 >>

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 >>

"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) >>

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:

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