We’re smack in the middle of POV’s 23rd season — and it’s been a great one so far. Encore presentations The Way We Get By and First Person Plural will be shown on select PBS stations in the next two weeks (check your local listings here). On August 17, we’ll be back with a brand new documentary — the beautiful SALT. Read on for updates from POV and news from around the documentary world.

Presumed Guilty

Presumed Guilty by Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete aired this past week, and many viewers commented on the film on our website and our Facebook page. The film tells the story of Toño Zúñiga, who was picked up off the street in Mexico City, told that he had committed a murder and then sentenced to 20 years in prison. Two young lawyers turned filmmakers (Hernandez and Negrete) set out to free Toño. The dramatic story made for a fascinating film, and you can learn more about the filmmaking process in this article from the East Bay Express.

If you missed Presumed Guilty, you can watch it in its entirety online — but only until August 4, 2010. In fact, most of the film’s we’ve broadcast this season are available online right now. Hurry up and watch, though, because the streaming windows are limited!



SALT, which will air on POV on August 17, 2010, takes the viewer to a remote lake in Australia where Murray Fredericks takes photographs of a boundless, desolate and beautiful environment. You can see some of Murray’s amazing photographs in a gallery on the POV website. Don’t miss SALT — it’s truly a stunning film.

We were surprised to see a recent New York Times profile of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel in the paper’s “Fashion and Style” section. Dr. Emanuel, an advisor to President Obama who discussed health care reform in a podcast for the website of the 2008 POV film, Critical Condition, is not only very interested in food (the article is about his love of food), but a food critic as well (he writes about food for The Atlantic). Dr. Emanuel is clearly a man of many talents!

The region of Catalonia in Spain banned bullfighting this week. Thew news made us think back to the 2009 POV film, Ella Es El Matador (She Is the Matador). The film reveals the surprising history of women matadors and profiles two female matadors currently in the arena. For the website of the film, we created a multimedia feature called Anatomy of a Bullfight that highlighted different stages and aspects of the fight. Bullfighting has had a long history in Spain, but it has drawn a great deal of controversy in recent decades. Now that Catalonia has outlawed bullfighting, will the rest of Spain follow?

Finally, congratulations to several POV alum filmmakers: Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini (Farmingville, POV 2004) received a grant from the Cinereach Project at the Sundance Institute for their new film, The Arizona Project. Meanwhile, Summer Pasture, the new film by alums Lynn True and Nelson Walker (Lumo, POV 2007), will be premiering in New York and Los Angeles in the next two weeks.

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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.