California Newsreel (Firm).

With the departure of the despotic Charles Taylor in 2003, the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces, and the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in 2005, Liberia was ready to begin the arduous task of creating a viable economic and social infrastructure. How does a nation mired in years of anarchy establish itself in the modern world? Is it possible to find administrators who will be dedicated to government accountability and transparency? In examining...

Filmed on the set of Two Trains Running, one of America's leading playwrights traces his work back to a troubled childhood in a Pittsburgh ghetto. His ongoing project to write a play on African American life set in each decade of the 20th century is one of the most ambitious endeavors in American theatrical history. In this program, he describes his award-winning plays Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom as passing down the wisdom...

This program presents a biography of Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son, taking viewers from his impoverished childhood to his involvement in Chicago's Black Renaissance, the Communist Party, and the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, to his exile and death in Paris. Underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the film skillfully intercuts dramatic excerpts from Wright's work with historical footage and the recollections...

In this story-within-a-story, Mabo Keita, a young boy living in contemporary Burkina Faso, receives a message from a traditional storyteller (griot) that he must "learn the meaning of his name." Mabo is a descendent of Sundiata Keita, legendary founder of the Mali Empire and hero of The Epic of Sundiata. As Sundiata Keita comes to understand his role in Mandé history, so the younger Keita grasps the scope and significance of his heritage - a lesson...

This program shows how Charles Johnson, a quintessential multicultural novelist, blends black folk tales, Zen parables, 18th-century picaresque novels, and 20th-century philosophy into storytelling of remarkable vitality. Here, Johnson explains that he explores metaphysical questions against the backdrop of black American life. Oxherding Tales and Middle Passage are odysseys in search of individual identity and common values among conflicting cultures....

On February 1st, 1960, four men dressed in their Sunday best sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. but were refused service because of the color of their skin. In this inspiring documentary, the Greensboro Four themselves tell the story of the lunch counter sit-in that revitalized the civil rights movement and established a model of student activism for the coming decade. In addition, Prof. William Chafe places the sit-in within the context...

A South African proverb says that "When you have touched a woman, you have struck a rock." This program documents the special contribution of South African women to the ending of apartheid with their massive, nonviolent civil disobedience movement. Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Dora Tamana, and other leaders recall their involvement, which included imprisonment and banning before victory was finally won.

Using Pittsburgh's steel industry as a case study, this bold documentary explores supply side economics and the trickle down myth, challenging the assumption that private corporations can be trusted to make the investments upon which all Americans depend. Called "impressive" by John Kenneth Galbraith, the film contrasts two Pittsburgh steelworkers' conventional faith in private enterprise with the actual strategies and priorities of U.S. Steel. Interviews...

The first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa, Dakan (it means "destiny") was met with angry protests and heated debate when it was shot in the director's native Guinea. The film is a contemporary African reinterpretation of the age-old conflict between love and social convention, the story of two men who by coming out become invisible to their society. The men try to deny their sexual orientation to please their families, but eventually...

Margaret Walker has been described by Nikki Giovanni as the "most famous person nobody knows." Walker established one of the first Black Studies centers in the nation, was mentored by Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois, and her signature poem, "For My People," set a tone and a level of commitment to which African-American writers have been responding ever since. Narrated by Ruby Dee, this biographical film combines conversations with Walker, readings...