Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
To get to the bottom of the current mental health crisis in the US, psychiatrist/doc-maker Kenneth Paul Rosenberg chronicles the personal, poignant stories of those suffering from serious mental illness, including his own family, to shine a light on this epidemic and offer possible solutions. Bedlam, an IDA Fiscal Sponsorship Program project, premieres April 13 on Independent Lens and streams through April.
As healthcare workers around the world weather the frontlines of this global pandemic, Kino Now has made available Carolyn Jones' 2014 documentary The American Nurse, which explores some of the biggest issues facing America—aging, was, poverty, prisons—through the work and lives of five nurses.
Recommended by Tiffany Shlain through her organization/film studio Let It Ripple, The Adaptable Mind was inspired by coverage of Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Los Angeles-based artist/professor Mary Beth Heffernan noted how isolating and traumatic it must have been for patients to interact only with people with hazmat suits for weeks on end. She thought, "What if they put pictures of their faces on the front of the suits?" Heffernan's film posits that the skills we need most in the 21st Century—curiosity, creativity, taking initiative, multi-disciplinary thinking and empathy—are skills that machines don't have; only humans have.
Now streaming on Quibi, I Promise, takes viewers inside the highs and lows of the first year at NBA star LeBron James' I PROMISE school, which serves the most at-risk students and families in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.
Premiering on Netflix April 15, The Innocence Files shines a powerful light on the untold personal stories behind eight cases of wrongful conviction that the nonprofit organization The Innocence Project and organizations within the Innocence Network have uncovered and worked tirelessly to overturn. The series is executive produced and directed by Liz Garbus, Alex Gibney and Roger Ross Williams; with episodes also directed by Jed Rothstein, Andy Grieve and Sarah Dowland.
Premiering April 19 on ESPN, The Last Dance, a 10-part series by Jason Hehir, chronicles the untold story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty with rare, never-before-seen footage and sound from the 1997-98 championship season—the last season of one of the greatest basketball teams ever assembled.