Independent Lens

Pipe Dreams challenges preconceived notions about an age-old instrument—the pipe organ—while introducing viewers to a new generation of passionate, talented young organists in the intense lead up to the Canadian International Organ Competition (CIOC), widely regarded as the Olympics for organ music and which attracts virtuosi under the age 35 from all over the world. Who will come out on top?

In this excerpt from Pipe Dreams, talented young organists competing in the intense Canadian International Organ Competition (CIOC) in Montreal practice, practice, practice, and even do physical workouts. Anything to get ahead of the competition, including bringing out their inner craziness, for what is widely regarded as the Olympics for organ music.

In this excerpt from Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, activist and prolific archivist Marion Stokes first becomes cognizant of the power of television to inform —or misinform—people when she starts appearing on a Philadelphia public access current affairs show in the late '60s. Stokes' realization of the power of mass media to affect public opinion was well ahead of the curve.

A fiercely intelligent activist who became a wealthy recluse in her later years, Marion Stokes was dedicated to furthering and protecting the truth — so much so that she recorded American television 24 hours a day for over 30 years. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project peels back the curtain on her life, through a mix of Stokes’ archive of recordings and interviews with those who knew her best.

More than just a picture-perfect postcard of iconic stone statues, Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is a microcosm of a planet in flux. Directed by native Rapa Nui filmmaker Sergio Mata’u Rapu, Eating Up Easter explores the challenges his people are facing, and the intergenerational fight to preserve their culture and a beloved environment against a modernizing society and booming tourism trade.

In this excerpt from Eating Up Easter, isolated Rapa Nui or Easter Island, 2,500 miles from the mainland, has to find creative solutions (like shipping recycling out) to get rid of excess trash piling up from the throngs of tourists who visit -- only to find the planet brings even more trash back to the island's shores sent by ocean currents.

In this excerpt from Rewind, filmmaker Sasha Neulinger and his mother revisit his childhood through powerful home movies to pinpoint the period he went from outgoing, gifted kindergartner to sullen first-grader.

Made up of home video footage that reveals a long-kept secret, Sasha Joseph Neulinger’s Rewind is a brave and wrenching look at his childhood and his journey to reconcile his past. By probing the gap between image and reality, the film depicts both how little and how much a camera can capture.

In this excerpt from Jim Allison: Breakthrough, while young medical student Allison was meeting his future wife at the University of Texas in Austin, he was also becoming fascinated by an important new discovery: T-cells. The center of the human immune system, they are "cells that go all over your body and manage to protect you and not kill you," Allison said, "to me, it’s just wondrous."

The story of one warmhearted, stubborn man’s visionary quest to find a cure for cancer, Jim Allison: Breakthrough is an homage to an unconventional superhero — a pioneering, harmonica-playing scientist from a small town in Texas who triumphed over a doubtful medical establishment to save innumerable lives around the world and win the Nobel Prize.

Brett Story’s critically acclaimed documentary The Hottest August raises the specter of climate change without ever mentioning it, spotlighting ordinary New Yorkers as they share their anxieties about what the future holds while bracing for what could be one of the hottest months on record.

In this excerpt from The Hottest August, two New Yorkers -- an artist/designer in his studio and a naturalist on his boat in Jamaica Bay -- are asked about their futures and the planet's. The designer talks specifically about issues facing the African American community for whom the future "becomes less important than actually trying to figure out how to survive for the next day."

America's three largest jails are also its three largest psychiatric treatment facilities. In this excerpt from Bedlam, while one person with mental illness faces a long wait in jail before finding treatment, California Gov. Gavin Newsom tours the Twin Towers Correctional Facility where he is shocked by the staggering number of people with mental illness housed in high-security jails.

Shot over the course of five years, Bedlam examines the mental health crisis through intimate stories of those people who are in-and-out of overwhelmed and under-resourced psych emergency rooms, jails and homeless camps in Los Angeles, while psychiatrist and filmmaker Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. also searches for answers to his own late sister’s mental illness.

In this excerpt from One Child Nation, Brian Stuy, Utah-based co-founder of Research China and father to three adopted girls from China, explains how a "recruiting network" worked to find and bring children into orphanages, children that were later to be bought and sold--trafficked. Filmmaker Nanfu Wang then wonders about each baby's story, of separated twin siblings, many of them unknowingly.

After the birth of her first child, filmmaker Nanfu Wang returns to China to speak with her family and explore the ripple effect of that country's devastating social experiment, the one-child policy. At its core, One Child Nation is a riveting personal story revealing shocking human rights violations and forces us all to reckon with the consequences of blind obedience.

In this excerpt from the film Always in Season, Lennon Lacy's mother Claudia remembers her son, and the very last time she saw him before his shocking death. "He had too much to live for," she says, rebutting the police report that said he'd committed suicide. Claudia went to bed the night before his death, with Lennon preparing for a football game the next day. She'd never see him alive again.

In this excerpt from the film Always in Season, Pierre Lacy, brother of Lennon Lacy, recalls the awful day he learned of his brother's death. Pierre is convinced Lennon did not commit suicide, despite the police report declaring it just that. Pierre feels the police tried to "force-feed a lie to my family." To him, it was clear that Lennon's hanging was meant to be a display, like a lynching.

Always in Season follows the tragedy of African American teenager Lennon Lacy, who in August 2014, was found hanging from a swing set in North Carolina. His death was ruled a suicide, but Lennon’s mother and family believe he was lynched. The film chronicles her quest to learn the truth and takes a closer look at the lingering impact of more than a century of lynching African Americans.

In this excerpt from We Believe in Dinosaurs, the staff behind the "Ark Encounter" exhibit at the Creation Museum in Kentucky explain how their $120 million theme park will show how the Biblical flood that led to Noah's Ark and destroyed the rest of humanity really happened.