Independent Lens

“Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story,” a wry exploration of the industry in which record producers set amateurs' poems to music and record them (for a fee, of course). Included are interviews with producers, performers, observers and people who have submitted their poems for musical adaptation. And there's a sampling of the results (examples include “Non-Violent Tae-kwon-do Trooper” and “I Am a Ginseng Digger”). Most songs are “in one ear and out the other,” says musician Ellery Eskelin (the son of a song-poem “auteur”). But, he adds, “There's the 10 or 20 percent that are from another planet.”

On an isolated Maine island of 350 people, a clash over arts education spins out of control into vandalism and death threats, tearing apart friends and neighbors. Sigourney Weaver narrates this program following a former Broadway producer as he creates a musical to help the community heal its wounds through songs about lobstering, loneliness and the beauty of the sea.

Since the 1980s, the rural working class town of North Adams, Massachusetts, has struggled to kick-start its economy following the mill closings. This program explores how, with the 1999 opening of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the town has united its blue collar base with visionaries from the art world to reinvent itself in the post-industrial economy.

Heart of the Sea is an hour-long documentary about Hawaiian legend Rell “Kapolioka'ehukai” Sunn who died in January 1998 of breast cancer at the age of 47. Known worldwide as a pioneer of women’s professional surfing, in the Islands Rell Sunn achieved the stature of an icon — not only for her physical power, grace and luminous beauty, but for her leadership in a community that loved her as much as she loved it. Named one of Hawai’i’s most influential women of the 20th century by ABC television, Sunn - whose Hawaiian name means Heart of the Sea - was eulogized in the New York Times for having “captured the heart of Hawai’i during a 14-year battle with cancer.”

Daddy & Papa is a one-hour documentary film made by producer/director Johnny Symons in 2002, it explores same-sex parenting as seen in the lives of four families headed by male couples. The film also examines the legal, social, and political challenges faced by gay parents and their children.