California Newsreel (Firm)

Heqing and Heping Fan are responsible for China's economic miracle - they and millions like them who reluctantly left their homes in the countryside for steady wages in the Cixi Industrial Zone. This program follows the Fans during their seven-day workweek and a rare, difficult trip home to visit the children they had to leave behind. The impact of what is essentially an instant industrial revolution has China coping with social and psychological...

This case study in media bias examines how ABC, CBS, and NBC network affiliates covered civil unrest in Miami's predominantly black Liberty Hill neighborhood following the 1980 acquittal of police officers for the killing of a local resident. Taking viewers behind the scenes of the newsrooms that reported the story, the documentary examines the ways in which television reporting typically represents African-Americans - local broadcasters anoint black...

This program focuses on the author of Sent for You Yesterday, Damballah, and Hiding Place, the man who, perhaps better than any other, epitomizes the painful split between middle-class blacks and the black urban underclass. In discussing his Brothers and Keepers-his memoir of a brother now serving a life term in prison-Wideman explores the factors that condemn one man to imprisonment, while another is able to transform a Pittsburgh ghetto, where both...

Across Africa, a belief in witchcraft continues to terrorize women. "Witches in Exile" tells the story of women in rural northern Ghana accused of witchcraft, and the role of witchcraft in. They are beaten and cast out, sent to special villages that serve as havens and mitigate the brutal side of the culture. "Witches in Exile" examines how belief in witchcraft operates in northern Ghana, the motives and sociology behind accusations, and the lives...

Reporter Jonathan Stack is besieged in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, where president Charles Taylor has just been indicted on 17 counts of crimes against humanity by the United Nations. James Barbazon is traveling with the LURD rebel army, which has pledged to pillage the country until Taylor steps down. In documenting the end of Taylor's regime, the two journalists provide insights from both sides of the conflict to create an in-depth case study...

This case study in "environmental racism" looks at the environmental and social wreckage left behind by a global uranium mining operation in Niger. Arlit, once a boom town, flourished in the early 70's its uranium mines employed 25,000 workers from around the world in high paying jobs. Arlit was alive 24 hours a day, earning it the nickname, 'le deuxiéme Paris.' Then came the collapse in uranium prices and the Tuareg rebellion against the central...

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...

A documentary on the landmark union victory in organizing the multi-racial workforce at the J. P. Stevens textile mill in Kannapolis, NC, one of the first in the South. This haunting film is about the rise and fall of an American town and the epic struggle of the people who live there. In the process it tells the story of dramatic changes in labor and demographics, in the nature of corporations, the rise of multinationals, and changes in the American...

After Thomas Sankara rose to power in a popularly-supported coup in 1983, he changed the name of his country from the colonial-era Upper Volta to Burkina Faso - Land of Upright Men - and launched an ambitious program for social and economic change. This program provides a detailed account of Sankara's four-year rule and explains why, despite his many tragic flaws, he is still venerated by some as the "African Che Guevara.

This powerful documentary exposes the practice of multinational banks of lending billions of dollars to brutal dictators throughout the world. Viewers are transported to Argentina, South Africa, and the Philippines for a first-hand look at how the incurred debt impacts daily life as essential social services are cut, resulting in restricted access to food, water, electricity, schooling, and health care. Human rights activists, including representatives...