Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Erika Cohn’s The Judge, premiering November 19 on Independent Lens and streaming through November, tells the story of the first woman judge in Palestine's religious courts. With the support of a progressive Sheik, Kholoud Al-Faqih assumes her appointment and adjudicates domestic and family matters with a subtle perspective informed by her early professional life as an attorney representing battered woman in both criminal and Shari’a courts.
Every four years, the Navajo Nation elects its president, whom many consider the most powerful Native American in the country. Frustrated about the lack of progress in the reservation, Moroni Benally, a witty academic with radical ideas, hopes to defeat the incumbent president. Moroni for President, from Saila Huusko and Jasper Rischen, follows the political newcomer’s grueling, lonely campaign against the “old guard,” and the monumental effort it takes to change the narrative and inspire people to move in new directions. Premiering November 20 on World Channel/America Reframed.
Gateways is a three-part series streaming on YouTube, courtesy of SoulPancake, a division of Participant Media. Gateways goes inside the lives of a group of incarcerated youth and the people behind the Gateways program, which is aimed at creating change through education in order to break the cycle of incarceration, violence and recidivism.
Currently streaming on Al Jajeera English: WITNESS’ YouTube channel, Korean Lovers in Baghdad, from Arij al-Soltan, follows Heba, a young Iraqi woman from Baghdad with a good job and the prospect of a decent future. At the age of 28, she has bought a modern flat in the newly built Bismaya City in Baghdad-- one of many joint ventures between the Iraqi and South Korean governments. Heba, like many young professional Iraqis, is looking to South Korea as a new vision for the future--and a possible new home for her.
Streaming on Doc Alliance/DAFilms.com, Vitaly Mansky’s Close Relations explores Ukrainian society after the Maidan revolution, as mirrored by the filmmaker’s own Ukrainian family. Criss-crossing the country, Mansky searches for the roots of the conflict after which citizens of a single country found themselves on different sides of the barricades.
Streaming on Mubi through the end of November, Adam Rifkin’s Giuseppe Makes a Movie follows the wildly surreal escapades of outsider artist Giuseppe Andrews, who has made 30 feature films starring the seriously impaired residents of his trailer park.