Independent Lens Movies

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

On the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, one fearless black pioneer reconceived a Harlem Renaissance for a new era, ushering giants and rising...

A dogged family-run paper in Iowa gives citizens the scoop on forces threatening to overwhelm their precarious small-town existence.

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...

In the US Midwest, plagued with opioid abuse and rising incarceration rates for women, three unforgettable mothers return home from prison to rebuild...

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

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

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...

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

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

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."...

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

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,...

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

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

Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by starting the country's first farm worker's union with fellow organizer Cesar Chavez. What starts out...

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

Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s is an intimate portrayal of three families confronting the unique challenges of Alzheimer’s and how this...

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...

Set in motion by a tragic police-involved shooting, two communities of color navigate fraught perceptions of injustice, inequality, and...