To bring closure to the inaugural ITVS Indies Showcase festival which just wrapped up, viewers were asked to select a favorite film for the always-coveted Audience Award. Well, the votes have been tallied and the Indies Showcase Audience Award winner is A Panther in Africa.

The documentary by filmmaker Aaron Matthews, which originally aired on POV, tells the story of  Pete O’Neal, a Black Panther living in exile in Tanzania who commits his life to activism and community service.

Congratulations to the filmmaker and thanks to everyone who voted!

Click her to watch a trailer >>

Wangari Maathai, the first environmentalist and African woman to win the Nobel Prize, passed away on Monday while having treatment for ovarian cancer. Maathai was the founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization encouraging women and families to plant trees.

She was recently the focus of the Independent Lens documentary Taking Root: The Story of Wangari Maathai and was featured in DIRT! The Movie. Maathai will be remembered for her work in women’s rights, democracy, and the environment.

Watch the trailer for Taking Root: The Story of Wangari Maathai >>

Orphaned as boys by Sudan’s civil war, Peter Dut and Santino Chuor survived lion attacks and gunfire to reach a Kenyan refugee camp with thousands of other children. After a decade in the camp, they come to America. Lost Boys of Sudan  follows them from Africa through their first year in the United States as they are confronted with the abundance and alienation of contemporary America.

Watch Lost Boys of Sudan now on ITVS’s Indies Showcase >>

ITVS announced today that it, along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has made a significant investment in Half The Sky, a primetime television special and multi-platform project based on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s widely acclaimed book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

“This is a project that means the world to Sheryl and me, and represents 20 years of travel, research and writing. We are proud to partner with public television to bring awareness to what we see as the greatest moral challenge of our time,” said Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer-prize winning author.

Diane Lane and Edna Adan, featured in Half the Sky in Somaliland (photo by Nicholas Kristof)

The two-part, four-hour broadcast will premier as a special presentation on Independent Lens in fall 2012 as a cornerstone of Women and Girls Lead, a multi-year engagement campaign led by ITVS to leverage the power of documentary storytelling to increase the leadership and development of women and girls worldwide.

Read the entire announcement here.

I thank God for what He has done to keep me alive until this day. I am very happy that this movie made by Arts Engine is going to air this month allowing more people to see and know unspeakable struggles of a mother forced to separation with her daughter and a woman whose husband was tortured and executed leaving her to care for 9 children in a death camp without help and hope to survive.

I hope people will visualize pain, hopelessness and helplessness of a loving mother to give up her daughter to be raped in order to save the life of her son and realize how my daughter Aimee is a true hero for her sacrifice for her brother and, later, her entire family.

I am happy that this documentary speaks to the background of some of ITVS’s staff and will help all viewers to realize what is happening even today to countless individuals, families, and communities.

To me, this documentary features my story and the story of countless other vulnerable women who do not have the privilege I had to be rescued and resettled to the United States and to have Arts Engine decide to make this documentary that is becoming a powerful tool we are using to bring social justice and forgiveness.

It comforts me in my determination of being a voice for those voiceless to raise the awareness of what keeps on happening and to call for action to end violence against women, families, and humanity.

To me, taking action is the responsibility of every human being, especially those living in a free world.  I decided to take action and to start Mapendo New Horizons. We want hopeless and discriminated (ethnic and gender-based discriminated) people to understand that there are new horizons we can focus and work on through FORGIVENESS, LOVE, RECONCILIATION, and PEACE through actions aimed to meet their urgent needs, solve their problems, and to empower them. Through what I experienced I understand what victims of violence and discrimination need not only to survive, but also to be empowered.

We called this documentary Pushing the Elephant for a reason and a purpose because no one can push an elephant alone, which means no one can bring positive change alone. Please — let’s come together, share ideas, and take actions to save and empower those who are going through untold horrific stories — like me some years ago.

There is nothing that can possibly explain my survival of 16 months in death camp without food, clean water, medical assistance during birth of twins on a concrete floor and in an unclean room I was sharing with 31 orphaned children, 4 women. —other than to be a witness and a voice to tell the world what is going on and to call for action. This is my life’s mission.

Sincerely,
Rose Mapendo

Violence against women and girls is a horrific and widespread human rights and global health crisis that demands an immediate response.

Far too many women and girls around the world are trafficked into sex slavery, attacked as they attend school, and endure violence in the home or rape as a weapon of war.

While most violence against women and girls is perpetrated by husbands and other family or friends known to the victim, a particularly pernicious form of violence has been taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Women and girls have been brutalized beyond comprehension — gang raped by militias, forced to watch their husbands and children killed, sometimes be raped by their own sons.

Pushing the Elephant is an inspirational story of one woman, Rose Mapendo, who experienced such horrific violence, yet survived and emerged from the suffering advocating for peace and reconciliation.

To learn more about gender based violence (GBV) and discuss the needed policy changes to prevent and end this kind of violence RSVP for a conference call on Wednesday, March 30^th at 7:00pm ET, hosted by the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) and our colleagues at Jewish Women International (JWI) and Arts Engine.

Invited guests for the conference call include — Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (IL), Pushing the Elephant filmmakers: Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel, and Kiersten Stewart, FVPF Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, moderated by Loribeth Weinstein, JWI Executive Director.

The documentary Pushing the Elephant airs tonight at 10PM on Independent Lens.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has a tragic history marked by invasion and brutality by imperialists and occupiers. Give yourself a primer on the African country and trace the Congo’s history with the videos, photographs, and resources on this interactive timeline, provided by Independent Lens.

The documentary, by filmmakers Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater, airs throughout February on Public Television. The film is part of the series AfroPop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange, produced by NBPC and co-presented by American Public Television (APT).

Rose Mapendo, Congressman Ted Poe, Ritu Sharma, Ambassador (Ret.) George Ward, Samantha Mathis

This past Wednesday and Thursday, September 15^th and 16^th, the filmmakers of Pushing the Elephant (PTE), Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel, and their main subject, Rose Mapendo, traveled to Washington DC  — in cooperation with ITVS — to raise awareness around violence against women and girls internationally. Also along were Rose’s brother, Kigabo, and outreach coordinator, Kim Borba. Filmmakers Davenport and Mandel filed this report for BTB.

Our first stop was the World Bank. In an event hosted jointly by the Bank’s Social Development Department and the World Bank Institute Fragile States Program, we generated concrete dialogue among fifty World Bank staff and partners on the role of leadership and reconciliation in response to violence in fragile and post-conflict countries. A panel that included Fragile States staff, Rose and the filmmakers followed the screening. The discussion focused on ways Rose’s experience could help Bank staffers better understand the communities in which they are working. Tamara Gould (vice president, ITVS International) introduced the program, contextualizing the value of social-issue media in inspiring action. Our advisory council member Kury Cobham, an operations officer in the Social Development Civil Society Fund, at the World Bank, organized the event and supported its success within the Bank.

As with all Arts Engine films, our outreach strategizing begins during pre-production. We recognize that the most robust outreach campaigns will be built upon relationships that start early, and that enable us to incorporate the knowledge, connections and ideas of experts in the issue areas that we address through storytelling on film. It was exciting to see our long-term planning result in the organization and successful execution of this event.

Arts Engine also collaborated with a coalition of NGOs working to help pass the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA). IVAWA comprehensively integrates helping survivors and the prevention of violence into U.S. assistance programs which provide healthcare, education, and economic opportunity and promote legal reform and social change in developing countries. The legislation makes ending violence against women a diplomatic priority and urges timely response by the U.S. government to respond to critical outbreaks of sexual violence in armed conflict, such as the mass rapes used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Passing IVAWA would help remove a major barrier that keeps women and girls from getting an education, working and pulling themselves and their families out of poverty.

In cooperation with our longstanding partner Jewish Women International (JWI) and nine other key NGOs of the IVAWA Coalition, we participated in a Congressional briefing on Thursday morning, attended by an overflow audience of 160 legislators and legislative and NGO staff. Paula Kerger, President and CEO of PBS described the power of Pushing the Elephant in conveying the brutal realities faced by women around the world, and the importance of the film and its upcoming broadcast on Independent Lens in lifting the voices of those women. Rose, a featured panelist at the event, shared her stories of surviving gender-based violence and emphasized the need to create local solutions to local problems, with women at the fore. Also featured on the panel were two of the Congresspeople co-sponsoring and pushing the passage of the bill, Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX) and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), along with Ambassador (Ret.) George Ward, senior vice president for international programs at World Vision, Ritu Sharma, president and CEO of Women Thrive Worldwide, and Samantha Mathis, actor and Amnesty International spokesperson.

As a complement to the public assembly, Kim organized one-on-one meetings with the offices of three Senators and five Congresspeople. These eight legislators represented both parties and included co-sponsors of the bill as well as those not yet supporting it. Michelle Freeman, senior policy and advocacy specialist at JWI, joined us on our rounds and we received an overwhelmingly positive response across the board, including a commitment from Representative Cardoza, (D-CA), not yet a co-sponsor of the bill, to bring it to the attention of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to ensure it expeditiously comes to the House Floor, and to come on as a co-sponsor. Similarly, Representative Nunes‘ (R-CA) chief of staff, after hearing Rose’s story, said he would recommend co-sponsorship of the bill. We were thrilled to see Rose putting into action the IVAWA stipulation that local women must be part of the solution, with seats at the decision-making table.

Our effective, productive two days in DC provided us with three distinct partnering opportunities – working with NGOs, legislators and an intergovernmental organization– three distinct ways of using Pushing the Elephant to inspire change—training, engagement and awareness raising. It was also our first chance to work with ITVS on outreach and to experience the organization’s commitment to harnessing the power of character-driven social-issue media to help people better understand the world.