Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
In 2014, 276 Nigerian school girls were kidnapped from a school in Chibok, Northern Nigeria and hidden in the vast Sambisa Forest for three years by Boko Haram, a violent Islamic insurgent movement. A year ago, 82 were released. Gemma Atwal's Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped by Boko Haram, which premieres October 22 on HBO and streams on HBO Go and HBO Now through October, tells the story of the girls’ time in captivity and follows their lives over the past year.
Native America, a new four-part series from Providence Pictures, premieres Tuesdays, October 23 - November 13 on PBS. Weaving history and science with living Indigenous traditions, the series brings to life a land of massive cities connected by social networks spanning two continents, with unique and sophisticated systems of science, art and writing.
Premiering October 23 on World Channel/America ReFramed, Personal Statement, from Juliane Dressner and Edwin Martinez, follows three inspirational teens in Brooklyn who take it upon themselves to make a difference by becoming peer college counselors in their schools. They are high school seniors who are fighting to defy the odds not only for themselves but for every single one of their classmates. They have decided to become the very resource they don’t have themselves.
Shirkers was a Singapore-made 1992 cult classic from teenage friends Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique—or it would have been, had the 16mm footage not been stolen by their enigmatic American collaborator Georges Cardona. More than two decades after Cardona disappeared, Tan, now a novelist in LA, returns to the country of her youth and to the memories of a man who both enabled and thwarted her dreams. Magically, too, she returns to the film itself, revived in a way she never could have imagined. Shirkers premieres October 26 on Netflix.