Independent Lens

  • Premiered: Aug 1999
  • Episodes: 530
  • Followers: 24
  • Running
  • PBS
  • Monday at 22
  • Documentary Drama

Seasons:

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Season 5
5x1
Worst Possible Illusion: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz
Episode overview
Air date
Oct 14, 2003
This film takes a look at the work of Brazilian-born contemporary conceptual artist and rising star Vik Muniz -- sculptor, photographer and self-proclaimed magician. Muniz, best known .. show full overview
5x2
Foto-Novelas 2: Junkyard Saints and Broken Sky
Episode overview
Air date
Oct 21, 2003
A spiritual thriller set in an automotive graveyard and a story based on a real-life plane crash.
5x3
Shaolin Ulysses: Kungfu Monks in America
Episode overview
Air date
Oct 28, 2003
The famous fighting monks of the Shaolin Monastery have seen a resurgence throughout the world, aided in part by the popularity of kung-fu movies among the hip-hop set and films like .. show full overview
5x4
A Wedding in Ramallah
Episode overview
Air date
Nov 04, 2003
This program puts a human face on the Middle East conflict by chronicling the story of Bassam, a Palestinian American telephone repairman from Cleveland who returns home for an arranged .. show full overview
5x5
Be Good, Smile Pretty
Episode overview
Air date
Nov 11, 2003
This personal documentary chronicles the filmmaker's struggle to know and grieve for the father she never knew, a soldier who died in Vietnam when she was a baby. Through her journey of .. show full overview
5x6
Livermore
Episode overview
Air date
Nov 25, 2003
Part history, part mystery, part comedy, this program is an offbeat look at one eccentric California town. A memorable cast of local armchair historians describe some of Livermore's .. show full overview
5x7
Eroica!
Episode overview
Air date
Dec 09, 2003
A unique classical music ensemble of three young women take the musical world by storm, collaborating with a struggling composer to debut one of the first triple concertos written since Beethoven's.
5x8
Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson
Episode overview
Air date
Dec 16, 2003
Recruiting a stand-up comic, a rock band, feuding academics and Hollywood actresses to his cause, an irreverent filmmaker searches for the secret something that gave Emily Dickinson her poetic power.
5x9
Get the Fire! Young Mormon Missionaries Abroad
Episode overview
Air date
Dec 23, 2003
Three young Mormon men, age 19, embark on a two-year rite of passage in Germany as part of a long-standing worldwide effort by Mormon missionaries to spread their faith at home and abroad.
5x10
Man Bites Shorts
Episode overview
Air date
Dec 30, 2003
Short film block: "Title": Directed by "Compulsory Breathing": David Munro "Don't Nobody Love the Game More Than Me": Martha Pinson "Sergi": Paul Sullivan "Dilly Dally": .. show full overview
5x11
Make 'em Dance: The Hackberry Ramblers' Story
Episode overview
Air date
Jan 13, 2004
For nearly 70 years, the Hackberry Ramblers have played an infectious, toe-tapping blend of Cajun music and Western swing. MAKE 'EM DANCE tells the story of the remarkable .. show full overview
5x12
Life Matters
Episode overview
Air date
Jan 20, 2004
A straight-arrow rural Texan Pentecostal/Baptist minister, Curtis Boyd relinquished the pulpit in the heat of the social changes of the 1960s and became a doctor who provided thousands .. show full overview
5x13
Why Can't We Be a Family Again? / Downpour Resurfacing
Episode overview
Air date
Jan 27, 2004
Raised by their grandmother, young Raymond and Danny continue to hold out hope for their mother's recovery from drug addiction -- even after she's given up hope herself. WHY CAN'T WE BE .. show full overview
5x14
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property
Episode overview
Air date
Feb 10, 2004
A "troublesome property" for his master, Nat Turner has remained a " troublesome property" for the historians, novelists, dramatists and others who have struggled to understand the .. show full overview
5x15
A Place of Our Own: Black Resort Communities and the African American Dream
Episode overview
Air date
Feb 17, 2004
Stanley Nelson is a third-generation, upper middle-class African American who spent the past 40 summers in Oak Bluffs, an affluent African-American resort community on Martha's Vineyard. .. show full overview
5x16
Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew
Episode overview
Air date
Feb 24, 2004
Jimmy Scott's voice conveys a young boy's innocence, a soft sensuality and the lessons of 76 hard-lived years of failure and redemption. Through concert footage and intimate interviews, .. show full overview
5x17
Sentencing the Victim
Episode overview
Air date
Mar 02, 2004
After Joanna Katz, a South Carolina woman, was brutally tortured and gang-raped, she survived to face her assailants and transform herself into a victim's rights advocate. Called upon to .. show full overview
5x18
T-Shirt Travels
Episode overview
Air date
Mar 23, 2004
As a worker with an international aid organization stationed in a remote village in Zambia, filmmaker Shantha Bloemen saw more and more unemployed Zambians selling used clothing from the .. show full overview
5x19
Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas
Episode overview
Air date
Apr 06, 2004
In his life and his work, acclaimed Afro-Cuban-Puerto Rican poet Piri Thomas has used creative expression as a means to confront and overcome poverty, racism, violence and isolation. .. show full overview
5x20
Love Inventory
Episode overview
Air date
Apr 13, 2004
Israeli filmmaker David Fisher inspires his four siblings to begin an emotionally challenging search for their long-lost sister. In a creative documentary style, with revealing moments .. show full overview
5x21
Ram Dass: Fierce Grace
Episode overview
Air date
Apr 20, 2004
When Harvard expelled faculty members Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary in 1963 for LSD experimentation, Alpert traveled to India and returned transformed into the beloved guru Ram Dass. .. show full overview
5x22
The Weather Underground
Episode overview
Air date
Apr 27, 2004
The remarkable story of The Weather Underground, radical activists of the 1970s, and of radical politics at its best and most disastrous.
5x23
One Night at the Grand Star / Double Exposure
Episode overview
Air date
May 04, 2004
In Los Angeles, there's only one place where you can celebrate the synchronicity of an old-school Chinatown establishment, classic jazz, DJ culture and the underground dance scene: the .. show full overview
5x24
Refugee
Episode overview
Air date
May 11, 2004
Three young Cambodian American men, raised on the streets of San Francisco's tough Tenderloin district, travel to Cambodia wielding video cameras to capture their experiences of meeting .. show full overview
5x25
Death of a Shaman
Episode overview
Air date
May 27, 2004
Through a journey that takes her back to her roots in Thailand, a young Mien woman from Sacramento strives to come to terms with her father's death and drug addiction, and her sister's .. show full overview
5x26
Cosmopolitan
Episode overview
Air date
Jun 01, 2004
When his wife and daughter abandon him, East Indian immigrant Gopal (Roshan Seth) reinvents himself as an all-American bachelor. With women's magazines as his guide, he pursues Mrs. Shaw .. show full overview
5x27
Sumo East and West
Episode overview
Air date
Jun 08, 2004
In recent years, the ancient art of sumo has witnessed the rise of an increasing number of foreigners to the top of its professional ranks. From Hawaii to Atlantic City, the experiences .. show full overview
5x28 Season finale
The Amasong Chorus: Singing Out
Episode overview
Air date
Jun 15, 2004
When lesbian music student Kristina Boerger moved to a small Illinois college town, she didn't find a ready-made community. So she created one with what she loved best: choral singing. .. show full overview

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