Independent Lens — Season 18

Best of Enemies captures the legendary 1968 debates between two famed intellectuals and ideological opposites: leftist Gore Vidal and neoconservative William F. Buckley. Their televised sparring shaped a new era of public discourse in the m…

Ravi Patel is almost 30, an actor, and, worst of all to his traditional Hindu parents, still unmarried. After he breaks up with his white girlfriend, Ravi submits to his parents' wishes and allows them to play matchmaker. The true-life roma…

Michelle, a precocious 20-year-old woman living in rural Maine with her mother, is legally blind and on the autism spectrum. With big dreams and varied passions, she explores love and empowerment outside the limits of “normal” through a pro…

Left over from the Cold War are a hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, covering a great amount of land. Governments around the world are imagining society 10,000 years from now to create monuments protecting future generations. Co…

Residents of Wyoming's isolated Wind River Indian Reservation, a young Arapaho journalist, and a teenage powwow princess travel with a Shoshone elder to search for missing artifacts in the vast archives of Chicago's Field Museum. There they…

After Kitty Genovese was repeatedly attacked on a street in Queens, New York in 1964, The New York Times published a front-page story asserting that 38 witnesses watched her murder from their apartment windows and did nothing to help. Genov…

In 1915, African American newspaper editor and activist William M. Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith’s notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which unleashed a fight still raging today about race rel…

Renowned musician Daryl Davis has an unusual, controversial hobby: meeting and befriending members of KKK, many of whom have never met a black person. When some decide to leave the Klan, Daryl keeps their robes and hoods, a collection built…

Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation in a dynamic, never-before-seen way, TOWER reveals the action-packed, untold stories of the witnesses, heroes, and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, at the University of …

Located in an impoverished Mojave Desert community, Black Rock Continuation High School is a last-chance alternative for students who've fallen so far behind they have no hope of earning a diploma at a traditional school. But extraordinary …

Ovarian Psycos is about a new generation of fierce, unapologetic and feminist women of color from the Eastside of Los Angeles who confront injustice, build community, and redefine identity through a raucous, irreverently named bicycle crew:…

Filmed over the course of nearly three years, Newtown uses deeply personal, never-before-heard testimonies to relate the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history, documenting a traumatized community sti…

Worshipped and treasured since the dawn of humankind, few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds, but in the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. More than a cautionary tale of “man against nature,” SEED: …

The Holocaust would seem to be an absolutely off-limits topic for comedy — but is it? History shows that even the victims of the Nazi concentration camps used humor as a means of survival and resistance. The Last Laugh weaves together stori…

National Bird follows whistleblowers who, despite possible consequences, are determined to break the silence around one of the most controversial issues of our time: the secret U.S. drone war. The film gives rare insight through the eyes of…

More people are imprisoned in the U.S. at this time than any other time or place in history, yet prisons themselves have never felt further away or more out of sight. A cinematic journey through a series of seemingly ordinary American lands…

The story of how Beitar Jerusalem, the most popular and controversial soccer team in Israel, spiraled out of control after their Russian-Israeli oligarch owner brought two Muslim players from Chechnya onto the team. Forever Pure examines th…

They Call Us Monsters goes behind the walls of the Compound, a high-security facility where Los Angeles houses its most violent juvenile criminals, to follow three young offenders who sign up to take a screenwriting class with producer Gabe…

Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on 43 acres in rural North Carolina. Farmer/Veteran shows Alex diving into life on the farm with his new love Jessica, wh…

A moving and intimate story of a family in transition, Real Boy follows the journey of trans teen Bennett as he navigates adolescence, sobriety, and the physical and emotional ramifications of his changing gender identity. Through the proce…


