Filmmaker Carol Dysinger Explains Camp Victory

Filmmaker Carol Dysinger

Camp Victory Afghanistan follows several soldiers — Afghan and American — across the divide of language, culture, and religion as they attempt to accomplish a near impossible task: crafting a modern army to serve a struggling nation. Filmmaker Carol Dysinger provided BTB with some backround on the project. Camp Victory airs this month on Public Television.

In 2001 we went into Afghanistan with the support of the world, it seemed. By 2003 we were doing regime change and Afghanistan disappeared behind the news of our adventures in Iraq. By 2005 it was like they were one thing.  One nightmarish mistake. But they weren’t the same.

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Tags: afghan national army, american troops, barack obama, camp victory afghanistan, carol dysinger, ITVS, PBS, public television, troops, u.s. army, war in afghanistan

Meet the Real Slumdogs on NatGeo

A scene from The Real Slumdogs directed by Steve Baker

The Real Slumdogs, airing tonight at 8 PM on the National Geographic Channel, examines what it’s like to live in Asia’s largest slum.

Directed by Steve Baker, the film takes place in Dharavi, Mumbai — which was also the setting for the Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.

Much more than a slum, this mini-city bustles with industry, culture, and dreams. The Real Slumdogs, an ITVS International film, aims to show the true faces of Dharavi by talking to the people who live and work everyday of their lives in the slum and struggle to survive in a community that defies expectations.

You’ve seen the Hollywood version; now meet the real slumdogs.

Learn more about the broadcast by visiting the National Geographic website >>

Tags: documentary, India, ITVS, Mumbai, National Geographic, PBS, slumdog, Slumdog Millionaire

Celebrate Gay Pride Month with ITVS

They’re here, they’re queer, they’re ITVS films that document and celebrate the LGBT community. Get used to it!

At the core of ITVS’s mission is to amplify the voices of the underrepresented in traditional media. In June, we get to celebrate the films airing this month across the nation, as well as those in our catalog that tell the rarely heard stories from the gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities.

This month, a remarkable film – City of Borders – airs on various PBS stations (check listings here). The film documents an astounding array of regulars at Jerusalem’s only gay bar. Palestinians (some who must sneak over Israel’s “security fence” to get there) mingle with Israelis, Muslims with Jews, men with women, gay people with straight people. It’s a stunning microcosm of peace and shared humanity amidst a landscape rent with conflict.

But also take a moment to browse through our film catalog’s sortable search engine for all of our films on LGBT topics.

Among them, notably, given recent news, is Ask Not, a film about the United States military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy that systematically bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces. Now that repeal of DADT has been passed in both houses of Congress, there’s hope that this film is about to become an archival document of a sad time gone by.

Tags: gay pride, Israel, jerusalem, palestinians

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

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans rebroadcasting on PBS

Two years before The Wire’s David Simon launched his new HBO series called Tremé, New Orleans producers Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie (now a writer for the series) produced the ITVS funded film Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. The moving and eye-opening documentary covers centuries of arguably the oldest and most fascinating African American neighborhood in the United States. In the film, newspaper columnist Lolis Eric Elie guides us through the historic community that gave birth to jazz and the civil rights movement in the South. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor co-habitated, collaborated, and clashed to create much of what defines New Orleans culture up to the present day. Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans goes behind the Hollywood version of Tremé revealing the real inhabitants of this fascinating neighborhood. Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is rebroadcasting on PBS in limited markets across the country (check local listings) and is available for purchase through www.tremedoc.com.  See why the New Orleans Times Picayune calls it “required viewing for anyone prepping for the upcoming HBO drama… Essential history and pleasure.”

Tags: David Simon, HBO, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, The Wire, Treme

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month – Watch My Father, My Brother, and Me on PBS.org

Dave Iverson and his father

As many as 1.5 million people in the United States are afflicted with Parkinson’ s Disease. And while research using stem cells shows promise and has resumed under the Obama Administration, there is still no cure. About $25 billion dollars is spent on the treatment of and care for Parkinsonian patients every year.

In honor of Parkinson’s Awareness Month, we direct your attention to a moving and informative ITVS film called My Father, My Brother, and Me, which was recently broadcast on Frontline and is currently available to watch for free online at PBS.org.

Producer Dave Iverson began making the film after he was diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease, just as his father and brother had before him. Featuring interviews with Parkinson’s sufferers Michael Kinsley and Charles Krauthammer, and research scientist Dr. William Langston, the film is part elegy and part rigorous investigation into the mysteries that surround the disease and the controversy surrounding the research into its cure.

Check out the My Father, My Brother, and Me companion website for a wealth of behind-the-scenes video, including an exclusive interview with actor and stem-cell research advocate Michael J. Fox.

Watch the trailer below:

Tags: Cure, Frontline, Michael J. Fox, Parkinson's Disease, PBS

Ancient Tribe Uses Technology to Preserve the Rainforest on Children of the Amazon Website

Map of Denise Zmekhol's journey

“I want our story to continue as long as the world exists.” —Chief Almir Surui

The documentary Children of the Amazon, broadcasting this month on public television and Link TV (check local listings), follows Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol as she travels deep into the Amazon in search of the indigenous children she photographed 15 years before.

A companion website www.childrenoftheamazon.com — available in Portuguese and English — brings the innovations of modern communications technology to bear on the forces of destruction in this fragile ecosystem and its native people.

Through a groundbreaking relationship with Google, the Surui tribe is using GPS, Google Earth, Android phones, and other digital media to document the devastation and connect with activists worldwide.

Website highlights include:

• Informative and entertaining videos documenting the Google Earth Outreach efforts with the Surui: Trading Bows & Arrows for Laptops (2008 and 2009)

• Blog posts from Chief Almir, activists, and NGO leaders working for rainforest conservation and to protect the livelihood of indigenous tribes

• A shocking time-lapse satellite view showing the devastating loss of forest in the 40 years since the highway was bulldozed through the state of Mato Grosso

• A Google Earth tour of the region and its history

• An interactive map of the filmmaker’s journey into the interior

Packed with information about everything from the history of sustainable rubber tapping and tapper-turned-rainforest-guardian Chico Mendes to ethnographic profiles of the Surui and Negarote tribes, the site provides updates on the people, a look behind-the-scenes of the making of the film, a vibrant photo gallery of then and now, and resources for people to get involved.

In 2008, Zmekhol returned to the Amazon to document Google Earth Outreach training the Surui people to use technology to protect their forest, preserve their culture, and empower their people. Watch the video Trading Bows & Arrows for Laptops:

Visit the Children of the Amazon website for more >>

Tags: Amazon, Brazil, Google, Rainforests

Denise Zmekhol on the Making of Children of the Amazon

Children of the Amazon (airing this month on public television and Link TV — check local listings) follows filmmaker Denise Zmekhol as she travels a modern highway deep into the Amazon in search of the indigenous children she photographed 15 years before. Her journey tells the story of what happened to life in the largest forest on Earth when a road was built straight through its heart. Beyond the Box caught up with Zmekhol who shares her story about the making of Children of the Amazon, one of the few films about the Brazilian Amazon made by a Brazilian filmmaker.

Denise Zmekol with Chief Almir Surui

I traveled to the Brazilian Amazon on several occasions between 1987-1990 to assist on television documentaries. During my journeys, I had the opportunity to visit many indigenous and rubber tapper communities, always with my camera by my side. What caught my eye were the children. Born to parents who had relied on the rainforest for their survival, these children were growing up surrounded by new ways — ways that were destroying the forest. I also photographed the legendary rubber tapper Chico Mendes and his family. Chico had become renowned the world over for his nonviolent resistance movement to protect the rainforest.

Fifteen years later — and a world away — I returned to these slides, which were never printed, never shared. The images brought back a particularly searing memory: a phone call from Chico in December 1988, asking me to film his funeral. Two weeks later he was shot dead by a rancher. Stirred by faces of the children in my photographs and haunted by Chico’s untimely death, I was inspired to travel to the Amazon again — this time, to make Children of the Amazon.

In 2008, six years after I shot Children of the Amazon, I returned to the Amazon to film with the Surui tribe again — this time documenting its unique collaboration with Google Earth Outreach. The partnership, a result of Chief Almir Surui’s request that Google help raise visibility for his tribe, involves training the Surui people to use Internet technology to protect their forest, preserve their culture, and empower their people.

—Denise Zmekhol, Producer/Director of Children of the Amazon

Get broadcast listings for public television and Link TV and learn more at www.childrenoftheamazon.com

Tags: Amazon, Brazil, Rainforests

Subjects From The Way We Get By Make History By Greeting Over One Million Troops

They’ve become famous among the soldiers who have passed through the airport in Bangor, Maine, on their way to and from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among their neighbors, they’ve become a source of pride. To a nation wrestling with the politics behind the wars, they’re an inspiration. They are the “Troop Greeters” of Bangor, an intrepid group of retired and elderly citizens who have taken it upon themselves to greet every troop plane arriving or departing Bangor, which is the last and first piece of U.S. soil many GIs will see before and after their deployments.

On Sunday, March 21, 2010 around midnight, the Maine Troop Greeters made history by greeting over one million troops at the Bangor International Airport. Joan Gaudet, one of the greeters and a subject in the ITVS funded, award-winning film, The Way We Get By, agreed to write about this extraordinary achievement.

Jerry Mundy (left) and Joan Gaudet (center) saying farewell to the millionth soldier. Photo: Shane Leonard

I am proud to be a Maine Troop Greeter. It makes me feel like I’m doing my little part through all of this. It’s a good feeling when you go to greet the troops and feel like you made their day a little brighter. They call us heroes sometimes but we know we aren’t heroes, they are. Some of these guys have gone through three, four, five, six times. And when they say we remember you, I think it means we must have done something right.

It was hard to believe that a million troops have gone through our airport already. To me, I knew it was a lot but it didn’t seem like it should have been a million. A lot of people say what an incredible accomplishment—how long we’ve been doing it—it will be over 7 years now. But to me, in all honesty, it’s kind of sad. I am happy that we’ve been able to greet that many but sad in another way, because it means we’re sending a lot of them to war to maybe never come back. So it’s kind of a happy and sad thing. It’s fun to greet them seeing their smiles and hearing their laughter but at the same time, when I see how many troops keep coming through, I can’t help but wonder how many we greeted actually came back.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, Maine, US military