The screening will take place exclusively online; you can join for free by signing in with Facebook (or directly on the site) and interact with other viewers, Central High students, La Cruise, and Sreenivasan in real-time, while you watch the film. Viewers can comment, ask questions, take polls, and even express their feelings about what they’re watching through a variety of tools on the site.

This is an entirely new way we’re offering some of our documentary films, and all of us are looking forward to an open, freewheeling conversation on Daisy Bates!

Find more information on Friday’s screening here.

Episodes three and four: From Selma to Soweto and The Bottom Line chronicles the grassroots campaign that targeted Western corporations doing business with the South African regime.

Join us on Friday for the social screening and feel free to ask questions, take polls, and engage.

Read a review of the app here.

Watch the trailer of Hell and Back Again, coming to Independent Lens, after the jump.

On his second day on the job, NPR’s new President & CEO Gary Knell tweeted, “Diversity is essential. We must reflect more of America, be accessible & relevant.” One way NPR is increasing diversity is through social media. 

After providing nearly three years of research and production assistance for the documentary We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân, Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program, Makepeace Productions, Interactive Knowledge, and ITVS have launched a beautiful and inspiring website called Our Mother Tongues, drawing from Cultural Survival’s network of contacts among more than 300 American Indian language programs nationwide.

Twelve Native language communities were selected to share stories and commentary about their local language revitalization efforts, including: the Alutiiq, Cherokee, Crow, Dakota, Euchee, Lakota, Mohawk, Navajo Ojibwe, Salish, Sauk, and Wampanoag. Speakers, teachers, students, and language advocates from across Indian country share their hopes and fears for the future of their native languages, and bring their personal challenges and discoveries to life with enthusiasm and candor.

Why are their stories important?  America’s ancient languages are in trouble.  Among hundreds of indigenous languages once spoken in the United States, today only 139 remain.  More than 70 of these are spoken fluently only by the most elderly generations; however, native communities throughout Indian country are comprised of survivors and the fact that any of our languages are still spoken at all is a miracle.  You can read more about the onslaughts our communities and languages have endured for the past 500 years at our new blog on the site.

While you’re there, celebrate our languages and explore the unique insights they have to offer. Send a postcard to your friends and family so they’ll know our languages are still spoken, and begin to understand these parallel challenges of language endangerment and revitalization.

Even today, tribal citizens struggle to educate local, state, and federal leadership and education policymakers about why our languages are integral to who we are as native peoples, and why we care so deeply that their embedded value systems and other cultural knowledge is incorporated into school curricula and returned to all social spheres.  Tribal language programs need more allies and supporters everywhere: in media production and representation, in local school systems and childcare programs, in higher education, in the halls of Congress and in the courts, in museums, in the sciences, etc.

The knowledge of planetary biodiversity and climate systems contained within our indigenous languages is invaluable for humanity at large, and there is widespread consensus among scholars that bilingualism and multilingualism in any language conveys cognitive and academic advantages.

Far beyond reinforcing self-esteem and identity, speaking more than one language literally makes students smarter across subject areas including math and the sciences by activating and creating new neural pathways, and keeping brains processing more than one worldview. Bilingualism and multilingualism engender and reinforce cross-cultural understanding and mutual respect — increasingly valuable skills in a globalized world.

Our Endangered Languages Program at Cultural Survival has worked for the past three years with a half-dozen Native American language programs, and a wide range of national inter-tribal organizations both to raise funds for grassroots work training new generations of speakers, and to boost the profile of Native languages locally, nationally, and internationally.

Language loss is a global phenomena, with many scholars and linguists predicting that as many as 90 percent of the world’s languages could vanish by the end of the 21^st century. Fortunately, indigenous peoples worldwide are rising to meet these challenges as we always have.  Now we are equipped with technology to link us together across the miles, and with a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which enshrines our language and myriad other human rights.

OurMotherTongues.org is your window into Indian country’s efforts to save our languages, and by incorporating Cultural Survival’s global focus on indigenous peoples’ rights to our lands, languages, and cultures, the site will only grow richer in time. Explore and enjoy!

The film follows Aneta Brodski, a deaf teen living in New York City, as she discovers the power of American Sign Language poetry. As she prepares to be one of the first deaf poets to compete in a spoken-word slam, her journey leads to an unexpected collaboration.

Remember to participate in the Independent Lens film club, while you watch, under #ILDocClub on Twitter.

Be sure to join the conversation next time you’re watching Independent Lens on PBS. For now, scroll through some of the chatter from this week’s episode, below…

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The interactive game, Hunt for the Noor Stone, just launched and features an in-depth, standards-aligned study guide for middle school students. The inspiration for the game came from THE 99, the comic book series featured in Solotaroff’s documentary Wham! Bam! Islam! which aired on Independent Lens last week, and is currently streaming for free on PBS.org. BTB caught up with Soloratoff last week to ask — why a game, and why now?

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Isaac Solotaroff and on my good days I get to work on documentaries and on my bad days I try to figure out how to raise money to make documentaries.

How long have you been working in documentary film and what inspires you as a filmmaker. Also, what did you do before making films?
I have been working as an editor and director since 1999.  Before this I was a high school history teacher in a town outside of Oakland, CA. The thing I loved most was my students. The next thing I loved the most was creating and executing lesson plans that allowed me to reach into the dry text books we were using and create narratives that somehow applied to the lives of my students. At the end of my first year, we were doing a section on the Reagan administration and I had my students watch excerpts from Hoop Dreams. It stimulated the most incredible classroom conversation we had all year — I get goose bumps just thinking about it. That was the moment I decided I wanted to make documentaries.

How did you come up with the idea for Wham! Bam! Islam! and why do you think the story of Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa’s quest to create new heroes for Muslim youth around the world is an important story to tell on public television?
I met Naif through family friends in the summer of 2006. He was just finishing raising his first round of capital for THE 99. I had been looking for a project to do in the Middle East and I was fascinated by the social experiment that Naif was embarking on. I had just finished reading a couple of excellent books about contemporary Muslim societies and was thinking a lot about some of the internal fault lines in that part of the world beginning with this struggle between fundamentalists who wanted to anchor their culture to religious traditions that date back 1,200 years and modernists who wanted to create a more secular society that could integrate into the 21st century. Obviously, Naif in creating new heroes and story lines for Muslim children in an American-styled comic book, was very publicly advocating for a more inclusive social approach to educating and entertaining kids. I was intrigued to see where this journey was going to take him.

We like to see producers working directly with local stations and reaching local communities in innovative ways. With Wham! Bam! Islam! you’ve ventured into gaming, and educational video modules and lesson plans. What made you take this approach?
My inspiration to make documentaries started in a classroom with 35 high school students!  I am thrilled at any opportunity to leverage the stories I am able to capture to create new approaches to reaching young people. I also had such a blast working with my incredible animation team led by Reno Msad and Rene Avalos and I thought it would be very cool to find another way to apply their talents to expand the reach of the film.

What’s the next big thing for you, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa and THE 99?
For Naif and THE 99 its the launch of THE 99 animation series on Cartoon Network in Australia and Asia beginning this January. Unfortunately, it seems that Naif has hit a road block getting the animation broadcast in the United States because some extreme voices in the media have made some uninformed attacks on THE 99 which has led the broadcasters to get cold feet. I am continuing to document this and look forward to being able to update the film later this year. In addition I just finished producing a documentary called Pelotero — which — and I hate to make the comparison — is like Hoop Dreams but about two young Dominican baseball players with dreams of making it to the Big Leagues.

And now for a few quick fire questions…

Android or iPhone?
Regretfully, iPhone…I mean its a great toy but a terrible phone

Dogs or cats?
I live in a 500-square foot apartment in Manhattan so the answer has to be cats. My cat Bodie is actually sleeping next to my keyboard right now. I named her after my favorite character in The Wire.

Elmo or Grover?
My heart says Grover but my nephew says Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!

I’m currently listening to…
I’m listening to a Spotify shuffle…at the moment its J Dilla — legendary hip-hop producer..

I’m currently reading…
Confidence Men…

I’m currently watching…
The MLB playoffs — Go Tigers!

Most overused phrase:
Its a toss up between “class warfare” and “clash of civilizations”

Watch Wham! Bam! Islam! streaming free on PBS.org

Visit iTunes and own a copy of Wham! Bam! Islam!

Be sure to join the conversation next time you’re watching Independent Lens on PBS. For now, scroll through some of the chatter from this week’s episode, below…