ITVS Broadcasts
Half the Sky Wins New Fans at PBS Annual Meeting
By Tamara Gould
Vice President, ITVS International
Based on the bestselling book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky will premiere as a special presentation on Independent Lens in October 2012. The project is a cornerstone of the Women and Girls Lead campaign and was on display at last week’s PBS Annual Meeting in Denver.
Just back from the PBS annual meeting in Denver and was absolutely thrilled by the response from stations to the upcoming Half the Sky series, which will air on October 1 and 2 as a special presentation of Independent Lens.
This project has been several years in the making, taking up the ambitious work of New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn who wrote Half the Sky to highlight the challenges that women and girls are facing worldwide — issues like trafficking, maternal health, female genital mutilation, and gender based violence.
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Comrade Duch: The Bookkeeper of Death, Sunday on Global Voices
The ITVS-funded documentary by Adrian Maben premieres Sunday, May 20 on Global Voices on the WORLD Channel.
Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch) is a Jekyll-and-Hyde character who began as a mathematics teacher, and then became the commandant of Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia, ultimately responsible for the torture and murder of 14,000 people. Comrade Duch: The Bookkeeper of Death recounts his flight, conversion to evangelical Christianity, and how he was finally brought to justice before an international tribunal. Watch the trailer after the jump.
What’s Different About Karla’s Arrival?
By Koen Suidgeest
Filmmaker, Karla’s Arrival
Many films have been made about street children. Some good, some not. The kids are a thankful target for filmmakers like myself, as we ardently become sponges for their heartfelt stories. With so much done already, why then, I was often asked, make another documentary about one?
The answer is simple: by means of a compelling story which accompanies a young street mother and her baby for over a year, I want to draw attention to the alarming reality of homeless kids who are setting out to start their own families. This is new. During several years of research, we found that the proliferation of a next generation of street children is largely undocumented. Governments, NGO’s, academics, filmmakers… not even Unicef manages data on children who are born on the city streets. Statistically, they are all treated the same, while the social differences between parents and their children are enormous.
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Every Day Is a Holiday Celebrates Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month
By Kate Sullivan Green
ITVS Broadcast & Distribution Manager
ITVS’s Kate Sullivan Green sits down with Theresa Loong to talk about the documentary Every Day Is a Holiday, which begins airing on Public Television May 1st.
Filmmaker Theresa Loong
After finding her father’s secret diary from the time he was a P.O.W., Theresa Loong knew she had a story to tell. In Every Day Is a Holiday, she documents her father’s path from being a Chinese Malaysian teenager serving in the British Royal Air Force, to being held as a P.O.W. in Japan during World War II, and his long, complicated path to U.S. citizenship that followed.
Kate Sullivan Green had the opportunity to sit down with Theresa and talk about making her first film, the ups and downs of documenting a family member, and what she learned about the challenges so many Chinese faced immigrating to America.
What stood out to you about your dad while making Every Day Is a Holiday?
His fierce, fierce, fierce determination. I always had a sense he had a really interesting life, but one of the things I’ve taken away is how much struggle he went through to become a citizen. That gives me more appreciation for him and for people in general who go through hardship. I consider myself an empathetic person, but this really puts things in perspective when I am feeling down. I have a deep respect for what he went through.
One other thing is that I didn’t realize how difficult it would be for him to relive the past. I guess I thought he was ready to share his story, but there were times when he would say, “Oh, that’s enough” or get up and walk away. Sometimes it was just because he was tired, but other times I’d see his eyes go to a far away place as he was actually reliving the moment. Especially with first person narrative, we have to balance wanting to know history with sensitivity. › Continue reading
ITVS Announces Production of American Graduate Latino Programming
The national public media initiative’s goal is to address the growing Latino high school dropout crisis.
Nationwide, Latino students face an increased risk of dropping out of school. 41 percent of Latinos ages 20 and older do not have a high school diploma, compared to 23 percent of blacks and 14 percent of whites. To address the growing high school dropout crisis among Latinos, the largest and youngest minority group in the U.S., Independent Television Service (ITVS) – the leading funder of U.S. independent public television productions – is launching American Graduate Latino as part of the national public media initiative, American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen, made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Launching in November 2012 with a series of shorts, American Graduate Latino will provide the core American Graduate initiative with broadcasts and online programming in both Spanish and English to engage viewers, teachers, and community leaders in identifying and implementing solutions to the high school dropout crisis.
Statistics on the U.S. Latino dropout crisis as reported by Pew Resource Center, 2010. Courtesy of ITVS.
ITVS Interactive Projects Awarded NEA Funding
The National Endowment for the Arts has selected two ITVS interactive projects to receive funding through its Arts in Media Grants.
This week, the National Endowment for the Arts announced projects selected for funding through its Arts in Media Grants Program. We’re proud to announce that two interactive projects, funded through ITVS’s Project 360 Initiative, have garnered NEA support.
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Optimistic Daredevils for Social Change
By Kaleigh Gaynor
The filmmakers and stars of the ITVS-funded documentary The Revolutionary Optimists were models for social change at TEDxChange and the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, where they introduced Map Your World, the new transmedia project inspired by the film.
A short piece from the film was created for TEDxChange, an event co-hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and TED in Berlin on April 5, 2012, where participants were encouraged to apply new perspectives to pre-existing big picture issues. The short, introduced by Melinda Gates, showcased the evolution of Map Your World, a cross-platform project inspired by the documentary.
The Revolutionary Optimists follows “The Daredevils,” a group of youths in one of India’s most notorious squatter’s colonies, who have made a dramatic improvement in the health of their community, a place that cannot even be found on a map of the region. Determined to make a geographic and meaningful map of their colony, the Daredevils have been painstakingly tracking and collecting data around health issues that impact them – water, sanitation, and infectious diseases. In 10 years, they have made dramatic improvements in their area: They’ve turned a trash dump into a soccer field, lobbied for electricity, and decreased diarrhea and malaria rates in their neighborhood. › Continue reading
Global Voices Tackles Kony, Women’s Issues, and More
Global Voices returns for a fifth season begnning Sunday, May 6 at 10 PM with Peace vs Justice, a film that examines the local and international efforts made to stop Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Africa.
ITVS has announced the lineup for the fifth season of Global Voices, the international documentary television series airing on the WORLD channel, with select episodes available online on PBS Video. Showcasing documentaries from Uganda, Indonesia, Russia, Chile, and Pakistan, this season of Global Voices presents the U.S. broadcast premieres of 13 documentaries funded by ITVS International, and encore presentations of acclaimed programs previously broadcast on Independent Lens, POV, and on Link TV. › Continue reading
Man Behind the Muppet: Thursday on Independent Lens
The documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey airs Thursday on Independent Lens on PBS.
Watch Meet the Man Behind Elmo on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.
When Kevin Clash was a boy, he built his own puppets and staged shows for the neighborhood. Today, he is living his ultimate dream as the big man behind the little, furry Muppet Elmo on Sesame Street. Being Elmo premieres April 5 (and can be seen again on April 9) on PBS. Check local listings.
Ever wonder what is Elmo’s favorite food? Elmo himself answers after the jump! › Continue reading
Three ITVS Programs Win Peabody Awards
Bhutto, My Perestroika, and Who Killed Chea Vichea were among the ITVS programs to earn the George Foster Peabody Awards this year. Administered by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, the Peabody is one of the most prestigious honors in electronic media.
Congratulations to the filmmakers on this incredible achievement! This brings the total of Peabody awards for ITVS films to 22.
Bhutto by Duane Baughman, which aired on Independent Lens, takes an intimate look at one of the most fascinating and important world leaders of our time, Benazir Bhutto.
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