Our friends at ITVS have announced “Women and Girls Lead,” a major public media initiative that’s set to showcase more than 50 documentaries about women, girls and leadership over the next three years and bring conversation around the issues of equal access, freedom, and opportunity into communities in the United States and around the world.
Today, ITVS, along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS, announced some of first group of films and miniseries that will begin airing on programs such as Independent Lens, FRONTLINE, POV and PBS Indies online:
- Women, War & Peace, a five-part miniseries revealing the critical, strategic roles that women have played in resolving conflict since the Cold War. The series also includes the U.S. broadcast premiere of the Tribeca Film Festival Documentary award-winner Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which tells the story of how Liberian women helped end a bloody civil war.
- Half the Sky, a four-hour documentary series based on the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (coming to PBS in fall 2012).
- Kind-Hearted Woman from director David Sutherland (The Farmer’s Wife, Country Boys), in which an Oglala Sioux woman struggles between saving her family and helping the abused women of her North Dakota community (coming to PBS in 2013).
Public media is partnering with dozens of global organizations, including CARE, the Girl Scouts, World Vision and Futures Without Violence, to maximize the reach of the project. As the launch video (embedded below) announces, “This is a call to action, to save lives, and to help women and girls everywhere to realize their potential.”
Read ITVS’s blog post announcing the project or find out more about the films and how to get involved at the Women and Girls Lead website. And if you want to get a jump on the series, Bhutto, a documentary about the first Muslim woman elected to lead an Islamic nation, airs Tuesday night on PBS.