Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Rachel Mason's Circus of Books, a project of IDA's Fiscal Sponsorship Program, premieres April 22 on Netflix. The film tells the story of the Los Angeles-based gay porn shop, Circus of Books, owned and operated by Mason's parents. The store served as the catalyst for LA's LGBT community for over 35 years, and the Masons themselves, a straight couple with three children, became one of the biggest distributors of hardcore gay porn in the United States. Circus of Books was the

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

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. We lost Bill Withers last week. But fortunately, Damani Baker and Alex Vlack had the good sense to document the wit and wisdom of the legendary soul artist behind such gems as "Lean on Me," "Use Me," "Ain't No Sunshine" and many more. Still Bill streams on Amazon Prime. Mailchimp and SXSW have teamed up to stream 75 shorts that would have premiered at the 2020 edition. Among the offerings: All of the docs, including Carol Nguyen's No Crying at the Dinner Table, which won the

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Streaming on Amazon, iTunes and Sundance Now is David France's Oscar-nominated How To Survive a Plague, which documents through archival footage the evolution of a movement during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic, when a group of men and women, faced with indifference and hostility, teamed up with the science community to fight for effective treatments that helped to tame the disease. In an interview in Variety, France noted the parallels and differences between the AIDS

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Yesterday, March 22, 2020, marked the 125th anniversary of the very first documentary ever produced: The Lumière Brothers' Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. It's only two minutes long and the title is pretty much what the film is about, but it laid down the foundation for an amazing century-and-a-quarter of mind-blowing reality! And, as if to mark the occasion, what won the Academy Award for Best Documentary this year? American Factory! A century before COVID-19, there was

In this time of social distancing and sequestration, Screen Time is here with a curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, written and directed by Jacoba Atlas, exposes a new and troubling trend: African American girls are the fastest-growing population in the juvenile justice system and the only group of girls disproportionately experiencing harsh discipline at every educational level. PUSHOUT features heart-wrenching stories from girls ages 7 to 19 across the country as they

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. To commemorate International Women's Day and Women's History Month, Women Make Movies is hosting a virtual film festival that highlights the new releases in the organization's Transnational Feminist Film collection. Throughout March, festival attendees will receive free access to select films about women from around the globe. Now streaming on American Masters, UNLADYLIKE2020 showcases 26 short films and one feature-length films profiling diverse and little-known American

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Hillary, a four-part series from Nanette Burstein, premieres March 6 on Hulu. The series profiles former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, interweaving never-before-seen 2016 campaign footage with key chapters from her five-decade career as a public servant, as well as interviews with her, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and a selection of friends and journalists to round out a portrait of one of the most admired and vilified women in the world. Now available on TubiTV

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering February 24 on Independent Lens, Jacqueline Olive's Always in Season, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee, follows the tragedy of African-American teenager Lennon Lacy, who in August 2014 was found hanging from a swing set in Bladenboro, North Carolina. His suspicious death was ruled a suicide by law enforcement, But Lennon's mother, Claudia, his family and many others believe he was lynched. Always in Season chronicles Claudia's quest to learn the truth and

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. We Are the Dream, from director Amy Schatz, focuses on the Oakland Unified School District’s MLK Oratorical Festival, an annual public speaking competition in which hundreds of children from pre-K through 12th grade perform poetry and speeches, both published and original, inspired by the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The film, premiering February 18 on HBO, then streaming on HBO GO and HBO Now, covers the months leading up to the 40th annual festival, as