Independent Lens Movies

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...

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...

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

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

Three homeless teenagers brave Chicago winters, the pressures of high school, and life alone on the streets to build a brighter future.

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

A filmmaker revisits her evangelical roots to find connection with her estranged father.

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."...

Bulletproof explores the complexities of violence in schools by looking at the strategies employed to prevent it. The film observes the longstanding...

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

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

The 1977 discovery of RNA splicing by Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, Kentucky farm boy turned Nobel-prize winning scientist, set the stage for a revolution in...

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