It’s been a great — and busy — week for us at POV. Keep reading to find out about what we’ve been up to!

POV films have been racking up awards at film festivals! Congratulations to Wo Ai Ni Mommy (November 30, 2010 on POV), which won the Grand Jury Award at Silverdocs. Also honored at Silverdocs was My Perestroika (POV 2011), which was recognized with a Special Jury Mention. The Oath (POV Fall 2010) won the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival; Presumed Guilty (July 27, 2010 on POV) won an Audience Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival; and Enemies of the People (POV 2011) won the Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the Human Rights International Film Festival.

We were delighted to air seminal filmmaker Agnès Varda‘s The Beaches of Agnès this past Tuesday, and we hope you got a chance to catch the broadcast. If you missed it, you can watch the film online through August 14, 2010. To learn more about Agnès, you can browse through this multimedia timeline of her long career and read essays by filmmakers about how she has inspired their own work. Agnès talked to POV from her home in Paris earlier in the year about her career, the influence of the surrealists on her work and how she came to make the film. Watch the interview (and check out her amazing hair style!).



Coming up next Tuesday on POV is Yoruba Richen‘s Promised Land, which follows two black communities as they struggle to reclaim land from white owners in South Africa. As everyone continues to focus on South Africa during the World Cup, Promised Land presents a different perspective on the country, where land reform continues to be an explosive issue, and economic injustices between blacks and whites remain unresolved 16 years after the end of apartheid. Watch the trailer for the film, hear from filmmaker Yoruba Richen and tune into the broadcast next week. PopMatters says the film “smart, subtly complex.”

Finally, this week, POV’s 2011 Call for Entries came to a close! DVD packages were flooding into our office during the last few of days of the submission period, and we’re so thankful to all the filmmakers who submitted their works for consideration. Now it’s up to us to go through all those DVDs as we begin the extensive editorial process to program POV’s 2011 season. Let the documentary watching begin!

POV: Call for Entries DVDs!

POV series producer Yance Ford (not pictured — except for her hand) and coordinating producer Andrew Catauro attempt to organize the packages that came in on the last day of the submission period!

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Former POVer Ruiyan Xu worked on developing and producing materials for POV's website. Before coming to POV, she worked in the Interactive and Broadband department at Channel Thirteen/WNET. Ruiyan was born in Shanghai and graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Modern Culture and Media.