Independent Lens: Season 18
Season 18 Lore Primer
Key plot threads, lore context, and character stakes you need to remember before diving into this season.
- Directly follows the overarching narrative developments of Independent Lens Season 17.
- Faction dynamics and core character alliances shift under escalating external stakes.
- Crucial mysteries introduced previously reach key turning points and narrative reckonings.
- Sets up serialized story arcs that build directly toward the climactic season finale.
Episode Guide
Season 18 Progress Shield
Best of Enemies
Oct 2, 2016 · 60 min
Best of Enemies captures the legendary 1968 debates between two famed intellectuals and ideological opposites: leftist Gore Vidal and neoconservative William F. Buckley. Their tele
Meet the Patels
Dec 26, 2016 · 60 min
Ravi Patel is almost 30, an actor, and, worst of all to his traditional Hindu parents, still unmarried. After he breaks up with his white girlfriend, Ravi submits to his parents' w
Best and Most Beautiful Things
Jan 2, 2017 · 60 min
Michelle, a precocious 20-year-old woman living in rural Maine with her mother, is legally blind and on the autism spectrum. With big dreams and varied passions, she explores love
Containment
Jan 9, 2017 · 60 min
Left over from the Cold War are a hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, covering a great amount of land. Governments around the world are imagining society 10,000 years fr
What Was Ours
Jan 16, 2017 · 60 min
Residents of Wyoming's isolated Wind River Indian Reservation, a young Arapaho journalist, and a teenage powwow princess travel with a Shoshone elder to search for missing artifact
The Witness
Jan 23, 2017 · 60 min
After Kitty Genovese was repeatedly attacked on a street in Queens, New York in 1964, The New York Times published a front-page story asserting that 38 witnesses watched her murder
Birth of a Movement
Feb 6, 2017 · 60 min
In 1915, African American newspaper editor and activist William M. Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith’s notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly blockbuster The Birth of a Natio
Accidental Courtesy
Feb 13, 2017 · 60 min
Renowned musician Daryl Davis has an unusual, controversial hobby: meeting and befriending members of KKK, many of whom have never met a black person. When some decide to leave the
TOWER
Feb 14, 2017 · 60 min
Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation in a dynamic, never-before-seen way, TOWER reveals the action-packed, untold stories of the witnesses, heroes, and survivors of
The Bad Kids
Mar 20, 2017 · 60 min
Located in an impoverished Mojave Desert community, Black Rock Continuation High School is a last-chance alternative for students who've fallen so far behind they have no hope of e
Ovarian Psycos
Mar 27, 2017 · 60 min
Ovarian Psycos is about a new generation of fierce, unapologetic and feminist women of color from the Eastside of Los Angeles who confront injustice, build community, and redefine
Newtown
Apr 3, 2017 · 60 min
Filmed over the course of nearly three years, Newtown uses deeply personal, never-before-heard testimonies to relate the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting of schoolchildren
SEED: The Untold Story
Apr 17, 2017 · 60 min
Worshipped and treasured since the dawn of humankind, few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds, but in the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared.
The Last Laugh
Apr 24, 2017 · 60 min
The Holocaust would seem to be an absolutely off-limits topic for comedy — but is it? History shows that even the victims of the Nazi concentration camps used humor as a means of s
National Bird
May 1, 2017 · 60 min
National Bird follows whistleblowers who, despite possible consequences, are determined to break the silence around one of the most controversial issues of our time: the secret U.S
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
May 8, 2017 · 60 min
More people are imprisoned in the U.S. at this time than any other time or place in history, yet prisons themselves have never felt further away or more out of sight. A cinematic j
Forever Pure
May 15, 2017 · 60 min
The story of how Beitar Jerusalem, the most popular and controversial soccer team in Israel, spiraled out of control after their Russian-Israeli oligarch owner brought two Muslim p
They Call Us Monsters
May 22, 2017 · 60 min
They Call Us Monsters goes behind the walls of the Compound, a high-security facility where Los Angeles houses its most violent juvenile criminals, to follow three young offenders
Farmer/Veteran
May 29, 2017 · 60 min
Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on 43 acres in rural North Carolina. Farmer/Veteran shows Ale
Real Boy
Jun 19, 2017 · 60 min
A moving and intimate story of a family in transition, Real Boy follows the journey of trans teen Bennett as he navigates adolescence, sobriety, and the physical and emotional rami