Six ITVS Films Slated for P.O.V. This Season

Don’t despair — Independent Lens may be on summer hiatus, but in its place is a riveting season of P.O.V. featuring some knockout ITVS productions. Get that season pass set up on your DVR if you haven’t already. Kicking off the regular season last week was William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. Did you miss it? No worries, watch it here for free until Sept. 21, 2010. Then tune in on July 20 for El General by Natalia Almada. This film grew out of a set of audio recordings Almada inherited which told the life story of her great-grandfather Plutarco Elias Calles, a revolutionary general who became Mexico’s president in 1924. Almada discovers that her ancestor was a brutal dictator whose mark still remains on that country’s collective memory.

September is chock-full of ITVS productions on P.O.V — Off and Running is an assumptions-busting story of an African American teenager who is the adopted child of Jewish lesbians, and is struggling to establish and understand her “true” identity. It premieres September 7. The following Tuesday, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee — another film about adoption and identity — makes its premiere. In it, filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem returns to Korea to find the fellow orphan girl whose identity she was mysteriously given when adopted by her American parents. Closing out the regular season is Laura Poitras’s critically acclaimed and award-winning film The Oath, airing September 21. Filmed in Yemen and Guantanamo Bay, The Oath weaves the stories of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo facing war crimes charges. The Oath unfolds via a narrative rife with plot reversals and betrayals that ultimately leads to Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Guantanamo, and the U.S. Supreme Court. And lastly, presented as a Fall special on P.O.V. is the Academy Award-nominated film The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, by Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith. Ellsberg, a leading military planner, concluded that America’s role in the Vietnam War was based on decades of lies. He leaked the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, to The New York Times, a daring act of conscience that led to Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War. Check listings for air-dates on that one.

Congrats to all the filmmakers for being part of this impressive P.O.V. line-up!