Independent Lens Popular Movie

For more than thirty years, and through his television program, Fred Rogers (1928-2003), host, producer, writer and pianist, accompanied by his...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Margaret Whitmer

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson

When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s "all in her head."...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Jennifer Brea

Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation, Tower reveals the action-packed untold stories of the witnesses, heroes and survivors of...

Genre: Animation

Cast: Violett Beane

When indie comic character Pepe the Frog becomes an unwitting icon of hate, his creator, artist Matt Furie, fights to bring Pepe back from the...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Matt Furie

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century – the Great Migration of African Americans...

Genre: Documentary

Cast:

The Force presents a cinema vérité look deep inside the long-troubled Oakland Police Department as it struggles to confront federal...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Juan-Carlos Zapata

Two women fight to hold the manufacturers accountable for the Agent Orange catastrophe. Incriminating documents disappear. Activists are threatened....

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Tran To Nga

Riddled with survivor’s guilt after his unit lost 17 men during “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan, Marine veteran Anthony...

Genre: Documentary

Cast:

Exploring the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini's startling discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Joy Buolamwini

Sonia Kennebeck takes on the controversial tactic of drone warfare, and demands accountability through the personal accounts—recollections,...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Jesselyn Radack

Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy builds a multi-million dollar empire by baking America's favourite pastry: the doughnut.

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Chuong Pek Lee

The story of the Black Panthers is often told in a scatter of repackaged parts, often depicting tragic, mythic accounts of violence and criminal...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Kathleen Cleaver

Forty years before WikiLeaks and the NSA scandal, there was Media, Pennsylvania. In 1971, eight activists plotted an intricate break-in to the local...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Bonnie Raines

Amidst the traditional pomp and circumstance of Filipino elections, a quirky people’s movement rises to defend the nation against deepening...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Maria Ressa

In 2010, the media branded a platoon of U.S. Army infantry soldiers “The Kill Team” following reports of its killing for sport in...

Genre: War

Cast:

When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal involuntary sterilizations in California’s women’s...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Kelly Dillon

A haven for Black intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries—and path of promise toward the American dream—Black colleges and...

Genre: Documentary

Cast:

In the early 1970s, a group of secretaries in Boston decided that they had suffered in silence long enough. They started fighting back, creating a...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Jane Fonda

Mentally ill. Deviant. Diseased. And in need of a cure. These were among the terms psychiatrists used to describe gay women and men in the 1950s,...

Genre: Documentary

Cast: Richard Socarides