Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Premiering tonight on POV, Viktor Jakovleski's Brimstone & Glory captures the days leading up to the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico—the preparation, the revelry and, of course, the dazzling explosions. Plunging headlong into the fire, Brimstone & Glory, which earned an IDA Creative Recognition Award for Best Music for composer Benh Zeitlin, honors the spirit of Tultepec's community and celebrates celebration itself.
Also premiering tonight, on Starz, Nanette Burstein's The Rape of Recy Taylor tells the story of 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper Recy Taylor, who was gang-raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. She bravely spoke up—in a time and place when doing so was very dangerous—and identified her rapists, and, through the help of NAACP rape investigator Rosa Parks, brought them to trial.
Streaming now on Kanopy, Yale Strom's American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs documents the story of one of the preeminent forerunners to former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his campaign against income inequality. Eugene Debs founded the progressive movement 100 years ago, which inspired FDR's New Deal and continues to have an impact on our lives today.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Penny Lane's Our Nixon, which consists entirely of Super 8 home movies shot by President Richard Nixon's top aides, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrichman and Dwight Chapin, all of whom intended to document the Nixon Presidency. As history would have it, the three landed in prison for their involvement in the Watergate conspiracy, Nixon resigned, and the footage itself, seized by the FBI, ended up in the National Archives. Under Penny Lane and producer Brian Frye's artistry, Our Nixon brings this footage back to stunning life, in an intimate and complex portrait of a troubled administration and a troubling era in the American narrative.
Also on Amazon Prime, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, from Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, checks in on former Vice President Al Gore—the star of Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth—as he continues his tireless fight around the world, training an army of climate champions and influencing international climate policy.