Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Now streaming on Latino Public Broadcasting's website, Latinos Are Essential is a collection of shorts that spotlight Latinosthat have served on the frontlines in the COVID-19 pandemic, providing essential services to all Americans--from healthcare to education to food service and beyond..
Streaming November 30 on The Criterion Channel are two films from Cambodian master Rithy Panh—The Missing Picture (2013) and Exile (2016). Panh, who survived the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, has devoted himself to exorcising the traumas of his country’s past through the cathartic power of cinema. The Missing Picture recreates, through clay figurines, the lost images of the genocide, and Exile ruminates on the horrors his family experienced at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
Premiering November 24 on WORLD Channel, The Blessing, from Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein, follows a Navajo coal miner who struggles with his part in the irreversible destruction of their sacred mountain at the hands of American’s largest coal producer.
Available for streaming on November 25 through Oscilloscope Laboratories, Manfred Kirschheimer’s Stations of the Elevated (1981) weaves together vivid images of graffiti-covered elevated subway trains traversing the gritty urban landscape of 1970s New York City, accompanied by a soundtrack of ambient city noise and jazz and gospel music from Charles Mingus and Arthea Franklin.
Also streaming on November 25 through Oscilloscope Laboratories and OVID.tv, Diego Echevarria’s Los Sures (1984) documents the Puerto Rican and Domincan communities in New York City in the early 1980s--their struggles with poverty, gangs, crime and racial tension, and their vitality, their creativity and their resolve to overcome their situation.
Premiering November 25 on HBO, The Mystery of D.B. Cooper, from IDA Member John Dower, tells the stories of four individuals fervently believed by their family and friends to be the mystery man who in 1971 hijacked a 727 flying out of Portland, Oregon, traded the passengers’ lives for $200,000 and four parachutes, lept from 10,000 feet over some of Washington State’s roughest terrain, and was never heard from again. Almost 50 years later, the case continues to confound the FBI and inspire wild speculation as it remains the only unsolved airplane hijacking in United States history.