Independent Lens
Spies of Mississippi
A secret spy agency formed to preserve segregation investigated citizens and organizations in attempts to derail the civil rights movement.
Code Red: China's Internet Revolution
Code Red examines the Chinese Communist Party’s regulation of internet communication.
- Funding Initiative
- Diversity Development Fund
Director/Producer
Risa Morimoto
Risa Morimoto produced the feature film The LaMastas in 1998. Since then, she has produced, written, and directed for film and television. Morimoto produced the award-winning program Cinema AZN, a half-hour show on Asian film for AZN Television Network.
President of Edgewood Pictures, Inc., a motion picture production company, Morimoto graduated with a master’s degree in film and education from New York University in 1999, where she served as associate director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute. From 2002 to 2006, she served as executive director of Asian CineVision, a nonprofit media arts organization. A second-generation Japanese American, Morimoto studied at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.
- Other ITVS Films
- Spies of Mississippi
- Wings of Defeat
We fund untold stories for public media.
Learn more about funding opportunities with ITVS.
The Film
Code Red finds a China at war with itself. The Communist Party maintains that with 450 million-plus Internet users, regulation of communication is critical to preserve “national harmony,” a euphemism for social and economic stability. Many Chinese citizens like Peter Guo are ingeniously circumventing the censors, energized by their newfound ability to express and communicate ideas and ideals on a mass scale. But others like Ai Wei Wei have been arrested for their actions online.
The proliferation of an inherently democratic technology in a society governed by a hierarchy is both thrilling and perilous. Over the last decade, the Chinese government has developed the world's most sophisticated system of Internet censorship. Instant and widespread communications empower individual citizens with a platform for self-expression, but those same exchanges give government regulators unprecedented power to monitor and silence persons it deems threatening. Has the internet revolutionized China or has China revolutionized the internet?
