Among the nominees are three Independent Lens programs — Tulia, Texas; No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos; and Crips and Bloods: Made in America.

Tulia, Texas — by filmmakers Cassandra Herrman and Kelly Whalen — received a nomination in the Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story, Long Form category. The film tells the story of a small town’s search for justice and the price Americans pay for the nation’s war on drugs.

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos — by director James Chressanthis — received a nomination in the Outstanding Arts and Culture Programming category. The documentary profiles legendary cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond and how they reinvented Hollywood moviemaking for an entire generation.

Crips and Bloods: Made in America — by director Stacy Peralta — received a nomination for Best Documentary. The film profiles America’s most notorious gangs and the brutal rivalries that have become routine in South Central Los Angeles.

Two Emmy nominations also went to the ITVS programs The Way We Get By and The English Surgeon, both of which aired last year on P.O.V.

The Way We Get By, by director Aron Gaudet, received a nomination in the Outstanding Coverage of a News Story, Long Form category. The documentary profiles three senior citizens who have made history by greeting nearly one million U.S. troops at a tiny airport in Maine.

The English Surgeon, by director Geoffrey Smith, received a nomination in the Outstanding Science and Technology Programming category. The documentary follows a British neurosurgeon as he confronts the dilemmas of the doctor-patient relationship on his latest mission to Ukraine.

The ITVS International program Be Like Others, by director Tanaz Eshaghian, also picked up a nomination for Outstanding Informational Programming – Long Form. Airing on HBO, the program took an intimate and unflinching look at life in Iran through the eyes of young men choosing to undergo sex change surgery.

See the full list of News and Doc Emmy nominations here. >>

We also want to mention a Primetime Emmy Awards nomination announced last week for Blessed is the Match from Independent Lens. The film earned a nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Special.

Congratulations to all!

Director Jessica Oreck inside the Kabuki Cinema

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, airing in the upcoming season of Independent Lens, sheds light on Japan’s love affair with insects. Filmmaker Jessica Oreck screened her film last weekend in San Francisco and shared her experience with BTB.

Last Friday and Saturday nights, the lobby of the Sundance Kabuki Cinema  in San Francisco was crawling with live insects.

SaveNature.org partnered with Argot Pictures to present this one-of-a-kind event for the opening of my latest film, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo.

We had three tables full of merchandise and exotic live bugs: giant thorny phasmids, Eastern lubber grasshoppers, giant African millipedes, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches.  It was amazing.

As moviegoers walked into the theater, their first reaction was usually “Ew!”  But very few people walked away without holding at least one of the creepy-crawlies.

Both screenings were followed by a lively, extended Q&A and the SF audience was so engaged!

It was especially great to watch folks handle the bugs post-screening.  Clearly their attitudes had shifted.

Thanks to all!

Learn more about Beetle Queen on the filmmaker’s website.

Insects mingled with viewers before the screening

Reps from SaveNature.org arrived to handle the bugs

Plotting an escape (or hurrying to get good seats)

The film tells the heartbreaking story of the thousands of post-Katrina pets who were rescued and then adopted into new homes across the United States. When residents slowly returned to try and rebuild their lives, these animals became the center of full-blown custody battles, with people on both sides struggling to do what was right in the midst of an impossibly complex situation (check out the trailer below).

At film festivals, the award that indies covet the most is the Audience Award. After all, these non-conventional filmmakers are telling stories not for fame or fortune, but to enlighten and entertain you — the audience.

Congratulations to Mine and to all the nominees: Between the Folds, Dirt! The Movie, Unmistaken Child, and Young@Heart

Director Vilmos Zsigmond

Iconic cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond — DP on such classics as The Deer Hunter, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — sat down with Independent Lens to answer a few of the questions the audience posed to him earlier this season.

Find out who his favorite directors and fellow cinematographers are, what’s wrong with American film schools, and what exactly constitutes the “American New Wave” he and his best friend Laszlo Kovacs are sometimes credited with ushering in during the 1960s and 1970s.

Read the full interview here>>

The season premiered with a fan favorite, Herb & Dorothy, about the unassuming Vogels of New York City who amassed a remarkable modern art collection on his salary as a postal clerk and hers as a librarian.

Between the Folds, Vanessa Gould’s visionary film about artists and scientists who are using origami to articulate concepts from quantum physics to the meaning of creativity, aired this winter. We heard from many viewers who found the film mind-bending and impossible to tear themselves away from. The film garnered Gould a Peabody Award this spring.

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos had something of a cult following in our offices. James Chressanthis’s appreciation of Hungarian cinematographers and lifelong friends Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond (winner of the inaugural Independent Lens Vanguard Award) introduced us to industry legends who — from behind the camera on films such as The Deer Hunter and Easy Rider — literally shaped the look of American cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.

Young@Heart was another viewer favorite, chronicling a season of performances with the eponymous senior citizens chorus. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen octogenarians rocking out punk classics from The Clash.

Garbage Dreams — a beautiful film about trash — aired this spring around Earth Day. It was shortlisted for the Oscar in documentary features, and came equipped with one of our coolest interactive games to date.

We rounded out the year with the grand finale — our only fiction film of the season: Goodbye Solo. This award-winning film from Ramin Bahrani (who Roger Ebert has called “the director of the decade”) told of a Senegalese cab driver who tries to talk his fare out of a one-way ride to his death.

You can go to the Independent Lens website on PBS to revisit your favorites of the year, and vote in the Audience Award finals (beginning June 14). And super good news for you, our viewers — if you missed any shows this year, some of them are available to watch in their entirety on the PBS video player right now! And lucky for you, a number of other films from this season and from seasons past are available on iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Snagfilms and YouTube. So go out there and watch something mind-expanding.

It’s not every June that brings the opportunity to see one of last year’s most acclaimed films on television and without even a cable connection, at that but this June is one of those times. PBS scored a coup by booking 2009’s striking Goodbye Solo as part of its Independent Lens series.
Read now >>

Premiering on 11 May, as part of PBS’ Independent Lens, Michel Orion Scott’s film suggests that Kristin and her husband Rupert Isaacson find themselves on this adventure, despite her own initial skepticism.
Read now >>

The Horse Boy is a touching documentary about one Texas couple’s struggle to understand their child’s autism and find ways for all of them to cope with it.
Read now >>

Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Alison Krauss, Patty Griffin, Big Kenny, Dave Matthews, and Kathy Mattea at Music Saves Mountains, Nashville.

As we watched the sold-out crowd in Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium rise to its feet while Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Kathy Mattea, Alison Krauss, Patty Loveless, Big Kenny, and several other musicians joined their voices together to raise awareness for the issue of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, it dawned on us: as of today, we are officially part of a movement.

This week, Deep Down participated in two Nashville events with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). On May 19th, the Deep Down trailer was shown in the middle of a star-studded line-up of musical acts at the Music Saves Mountains concert at the Ryman. The following night, when Deep Down screened with Coal Country at the historic Belcourt Theater, country music star Kathy Mattea told us, “I had a couple overwhelming waves of emotion during the day,” and “It was a moment I’ll never forget. I had this moment standing on the stage thinking, this is the moment, where something bigger is happening — where a movement becomes a movement.”

Mattea is from West Virginia, and both of her grandfathers were coal miners.  She now speaks (and sings) in support of the Appalachian Mountains and people. She said of Deep Down, “What a powerful film that was. There are so many people like the woman in this film, who have tried to keep their hearts open and still fight against something that they think is wrong. And I have so much respect for them, and I’m humbled by their tirelessness, their fearlessness.”

Deep Down panel discussion at the historic Belcourt Theater

After the show, we shared ideas with Mattea about how nonviolent change occurs, often by focusing on common ground and concerns that we all share as human beings — safety, health, access to clean drinking water, education, and opportunity.

We were surprised to find that most of the audience stayed for the panel discussion with Mattea, Rob Perks from NRDC, the great activist Judy Bonds, Mary Lynn Evans (maker of Coal Country), ourselves, and Terry Ratliff, our subject, asking questions like, “What can we do?” And, “Is this information reaching communities in the coalfields?”  We never thought they’d ask.

When we began production in 2007, we quickly learned to describe to disbelieving friends and family what mountaintop removal was, before we could describe the storytelling project upon which we had embarked.  Now, in 2010, thanks to some trailblazing advocacy and media attention that has preceded the release of our film, the phrase “mountaintop removal mining” is (almost) a household term — and we can get right down to the business of telling our great little story about a great big thing, while offering a new, more complex, and less stereotypical portrait of Appalachia.

Now, as we plan for our national broadcast on Independent Lens this fall, it’s just a little easier to envision American families and regular folks gathering around their televisions after dinner to watch Deep Down and connect to people who aren’t so different from themselves — articulate, questioning, powerful beings who can use their voices to make a difference in their own communities.

Jen Gilomen & Sally Rubin
Co-Directors, Deep Down

Deep Down: a story from the heart of coal country was funded through the ITVS-LINCS initiative and will air on Independent Lens in fall of 2010. To learn more about the film, screenings, and issues, or to host your own community screening, visit http://deepdownfilm.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