Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Premiering October 14 on POV and streaming through the month on POV.org Assia Boundaoui's The Feeling of Being Watched, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee, takes viewers to the Chicago neighborhood where Boundaoui grew up, where most residents in her Muslim immigrant neighborhood believe they are under surveillance. Boundaoui investigates and uncovers FBI documents about "Operation Vulgar Betrayal," one of the largest pre-9/11 counterterrorism probes conducted on domestic soil, right in the filmmaker’s hometown.
Liberty: Mother of Exiles, directed and produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, tells the story of one of America’s most iconic symbols of hope and freedom: The Statue of Liberty--from its origins in France as the vision of sculptor sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi; through the logistical, financial and engineering challenges of realizing this vision; to the campaign today to build a new museum at the base of the statue. Liberty: Mother of Exiles premieres October 17 on HBO.
Leavenworth, a world-premiere series on Starz, profiles Clint Lorance, who is serving a 19-year sentence for murder at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth. While deployed in Afghanistan in July 2012, the former lieutenant ordered fire on three local men riding a motorcycle, killing two of them and outraging his platoon. In a firsthand account of a soldier navigating the US Army’s legal system, Lorance seeks to overturn his conviction, which provokes an emotional debate between supporters and detractors that rises to the national stage. As determinations on Lorance’s fate unfold, questions probe not only the merits of his conviction but analyze the system at large, and they ultimately test the balance of guilt and innocence in the inscrutable circumstances of today’s wars. Leavenworth, executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh, premieres October 20.
Premiering October 18 on Netflix is Ed Perkins' Tell Me Who I Am. When 18-year-old Alex Lewis wakes up from a coma after surviving a motorcycle accident, he has forgotten everything. He relies on his identical twin brother, Marcus, to give him his memory back. Tell Me Who I Am is a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful voyage that explores the blurred boundaries of memory and reality, and the emotional bonds that allow us to survive.
In Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, the Academy Award-nominated documentary from Deborah Hoffman, the filmmaker chronicles the various stages of a mother's Alzheimer's Disease and the evolution of a daughter's response to the illness. The desire to cure the incurable--to set right her mother's confusion and forgetfulness, to temper her mother's obsessiveness--gives way to an acceptance which is finally liberating for both daughter and mother. Now streaming on OVID.TV.