POV
Since 1988, POV has been the home for the world’s boldest contemporary filmmakers, celebrating intriguing personal stories that spark conversation and inspire action.
Episodes
Season 36
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Episode
POV Shorts: Under G-d
A look at the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe through the lived experiences of impacted Jewish women and the interfaith leaders advancing a freedom of religion argument to challenge abortion bans. Through the lens of maintaining the separation between church and state, these nationwide efforts are focused on protecting religious freedom – and democracy – for all.
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Short
After Sherman
Filmmaker Jon-Sesrie Goff returns to the coastal South Carolina land that his family purchased after emancipation. His desire to explore his Gullah/Geechee roots leads to a poetic investigation of Black inheritance, trauma, and generational wisdom, amidst the tensions that have shaped American history. In the wake of recent Southern violence, After Sherman is a reclamation of Black life and space.
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Episode
A Story of Bones
As Construction Environmental Officer for St. Helena's troubled airport project, Annina van Neel learns about an unmarked mass burial ground of an estimated 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans. Haunted by this historical injustice, she and African American preservationist Peggy King Jorde fight for their proper memorialization, exposing the UK's colonial past and present.
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Short
Liquor Store Dreams
In Liquor Store Dreams, two Korean American children of liquor store owners reconcile their own dreams with those of their immigrant parents. Along the way, they confront the complex legacies of LA's racial landscape, including the 1991 murder of Latasha Harlins and the 1992 uprisings sparked by the police beating of Rodney King, while engaged in current struggles for social and economic justice.
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Short
A House Made of Splinters
In the shadow of war by the frontlines in Eastern Ukraine, a safe haven provides refuge for children who have been temporarily separated from their parents. A House Made of Splinters chronicles three displaced kids who, despite the perils surrounding them, find moments of joy, friendship, and childhood wonder, with the aid of dedicated social workers who work tirelessly to protect them from harm.
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Episode
Eat Your Catfish
Paralyzed by late-stage ALS and reliant on round-the-clock care, Kathryn clings to a mordant wit as she yearns to witness her daughter's wedding. Drawn from 930 hours of footage shot from her fixed point of view, Eat Your Catfish delivers a brutally frank and darkly humorous portrait of a family teetering on the brink, grappling with the daily demands of disability and in-home caregiving.
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Episode
Children of the Mist
Children of the Mist traces the story of Di, a 13-year-old girl coming of age in an indigenous Hmong community in the mountains of Northwest Vietnam. As part of the first generation in her village with access to formal education, Di navigates the cultural and social challenges faced by young girls in her community while balancing inherited tradition with change.
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Episode
While We Watched
A timely depiction of a newsroom in crisis, While We Watched follows tormented journalist Ravish Kumar for two years as he battles a barrage of fake news, falling ratings and the resulting cutbacks. Are there viewers for fact-based analyses anymore? Will his show survive or become a swan song of reason – drowning out in sensationalism, misinformation, and ratings-driven editorial decisions?
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Episode
Bulls and Saints
After 20 years living in the United States, an undocumented family decides to return home. Little do they know it will be the most difficult journey of their lives and reawaken an intense desire for a place to belong. Set between the rodeo arenas of North Carolina and the spellbinding Mexican town they yearn for, Bulls and Saints is a love story about reverse migration, rebellion, and redemption.
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Short
Uýra – The Rising Forest
While traveling through the Amazon, Uýra shares ancestral knowledge with Indigenous youth to promote the significance of identity and place, threatened by Brazil's oppressive political regime. Through dance, poetry, and stunning characterization, Uýra boldly confronts historical racism, transphobia, and environmental destruction, while emphasizing the interdependence of humans and the environment.
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Episode
Murders That Matter
How would you handle the trauma of losing a loved one? Set in Philadelphia, Murders That Matter documents African American, Muslim mother Movita Johnson-Harrell over five years as she transforms from victim of violent trauma into a fierce advocate against gun violence in Black communities. Her relentless activism exposes the emotional and psychological toll the killings take on those left behind.
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Episode
Aurora's Sunrise
At 14, Aurora Madriganian survived the horrors of the Armenian Genocide and escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Her newfound fame led to her starring as herself in Auction of Souls, one of Hollywood's earliest blockbusters. Blending storybook animation, video testimony, and rediscovered footage from her lost silent epic, Aurora's Sunrise revives her forgotten story.
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Episode
Fire Through Dry Grass
Wearing snapback caps and Air Jordans, the Reality Poets don’t look like typical nursing home residents. In Fire Through Dry Grass, these young, Black and brown disabled artists document their lives on lockdown during Covid, using their poetry and art to underscore the danger and imprisonment they feel. In the face of institutional neglect, they refuse to be abused, confined, and erased.
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Short
Wisdom Gone Wild
A vibrant tender cine-poem, a filmmaker collaborates with her Nisei mother as they confront the painful curious reality of wisdom ‘gone wild’ in the shadows of dementia. Made over 16 years, the film blends humor and sadness in an encounter between mother and daughter that blooms into an affectionate portrait of love, care, and a relationship transformed.
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Episode
How to Have an American Baby
How to Have an American Baby is a kaleidoscopic voyage into the shadow economy that caters to Chinese tourists who travel to the US to give birth in order to obtain citizenship for their babies. Told through a series of intimately observed vignettes, the story of a hidden global economy emerges–depicting the fortunes and tragedies that befall the ordinary people caught in its web.
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Episode
Brief Tender Light
A Ghanaian MIT alum follows four African students at his alma mater as they strive to become agents of change for their home countries Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey, all must decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.
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Episode
unseen
As a blind, undocumented immigrant, Pedro faces obstacles to obtain his college degree, become a social worker, and support his family. Uncertainty looms over him even after he graduates. Through experimental cinematography and sound, unseen reimagines the accessibility of cinema, while exploring the intersections of immigration, disability, and mental health.
Season 35
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Episode
Wuhan Wuhan
With unprecedented access in a period of pandemic lockdown, Wuhan Wuhan documents February and March 2020 in Wuhan where the coronavirus was first discovered. Going beyond the statistics and salacious headlines, frontline medical workers, patients, and ordinary citizens put a human face on the early days of the mysterious virus as they grapple with an invisible, deadly killer.
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Episode
Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust
Three communities intersect, sharing histories of forced removal – Japanese Americans who were incarcerated at the Manzanar WWII concentration camp, Native Americans who were forced from these lands, and ranchers turned environmentalists, who were bought out by the LA Department of Water and Power. How do they come together in the present moment to defend their land and water from Los Angeles?
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Episode
Winter's Yearning
In Maniitsoq, Greenland, the US aluminum giant Alcoa Corporation has been planning to build a smelting plant for years. With the promise of economic renewal, Winter's Yearning follows the lives of the area’s loyal aging population and its stymied youth. Pictured against immense, isolating landscapes, the people await their plant and with it, the nation's possible first step towards sovereignty.
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Episode
He's My Brother
Christine's brother Peter experiences his world through touch, smell, and taste. Now 30 years old, Peter's family is having trouble finding the proper care for his multiple disabilities. Told through Christine's eyes, He's My Brother explores how the family works to assure him a dignified life once the parents are gone -- and Christine's uncertainties about one day becoming his primary caregiver.
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Preview
President
Zimbabwe is at a crossroads. The new leader of the opposition party, MDC, Nelson Chamisa, is challenging the old guard, ZANU-PF, represented by the acting president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. The 2018 Zimbabwean general election serves as the ultimate test for both the ruling party and for the opposition. How will they interpret democracy in a post-Mugabe era – in discourse and in practice?
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Preview
Faya Dayi
A hypnotic immersion in the world of Harar, Ethiopia, a place where one commodity – khat, a euphoria-inducing plant – holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life, Faya Dayi captures intimate moments in the lives of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from political strife.
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Episode
Love & Stuff
“How do you live without your mother?” Filmmaker Judith Helfand asks this unbearable question twice: as a daughter caring for her terminally ill mother, and as an “old new mom,” single parenting her much-longed-for adopted baby girl. With footage from 25 years of first-person filmmaking, shiva babka and 63 boxes of dead parents’ “stuff,” the film asks: what do we really need to leave our children?
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Preview
Delikado
Palawan is a tropical island paradise and one of Asia's tourist hotspots. But for a tiny network of environmental crusaders struggling to protect its spectacular forests and seas, it is a battlefield. Delikado follows three land defenders as they brave violence, death threats and murder while trying to stop politicians and businessmen from destroying the Philippines’ last ecological frontier.
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Episode
The Last Out
Three Cuban baseball players leave their families and risk exile to train in Central America and chase their dreams of playing in the United States. At the shadowy nexus of the migrant trail and pro sports, The Last Out chronicles their difficult journey, from multi-step immigration obstacles and learning English to the broken promises and dubious motives of agents.
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Preview
Accepted
Accepted follows four high school students at T.M. Landry, a prep school in Louisiana known for its viral videos of seniors being accepted to the Ivy Leagues, and sending 100% of its graduates to college. But an explosive NY Times article exposes the controversial methods of its dynamic founder -- and the fiction of higher education's promise.
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Preview
Who Killed Vincent Chin?
On a hot summer night in Detroit in 1982, Ronald Ebens, an autoworker, killed Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American engineer with a baseball bat. Although he confessed, he never spent a day in jail. This gripping Academy Award-nominated film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system.
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Episode
An Act of Worship
In An Act of Worship, Muslim-Americans recount the past 30 years of pivotal moments in U.S. history and policy from their own perspective. Weaving together observational footage of activists who came of age after 9/11, community-sourced home videos and evocative recollections from individuals impacted by incidents of Islamophobia, the film opens a window into their world through collective memory.
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Preview
Midwives
Midwives chronicles two women who run a makeshift medical clinic in a region torn apart by violent ethnic divisions. Hla, the owner, is a Buddhist in western Myanmar, where the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, are persecuted and denied basic rights. Nyo Nyo is a Muslim and an apprentice. Encouraged and challenged by Hla, Nyo Nyo is determined to become a steady health care provider for her people.
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Episode
Let the Little Light Shine
National Teachers Academy (NTA) is considered a beacon for Black children: a top-ranked, high-performing elementary school in the fastest growing neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. As the neighborhood gentrifies, a wealthy parents’ group seeks to close NTA and replace it with a high school campus. How will NTA's community fight to save their beloved institution?
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Preview
I Didn't See You There
Spurred by the spectacle of a circus tent outside his Oakland apartment, a disabled filmmaker launches into a meditative journey exploring the history of freakdom, vision, and (in)visibility. Shot from director Reid Davenport's physical perspective - mounted to his wheelchair or handheld - I Didn't See You There serves as a clear rebuke to the norm of disabled people being seen and not heard.
