In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer, who has covered the industrialists Charles and David Koch extensively, chronicles the fate of two documentaries produced for PBS, Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue, which explored the lives of both wealthy residents of a single building on one end of the street and poorer New Yorkers at the other, and Citizen Koch, which examined the consequences of the Citizens United decision. Both movies ran into trouble for the same reason: fear of offending David Koch, who has been a major public television donor, and was until recently on the board of New York public television affiliate WNET. While Park Avenue eventually made it to air on PBS, albeit with a recut introduction and a discussion afterwards that excluded Gibney, Citizen Koch, which was initially supposed to be part of the Independent Lens series, ended up off the lineup. Whether or not David Koch was involved, Mayer’s story would still be interesting as an illustration of what happens when two different philanthropic models bump up against each other.

On one side are the foundations. Gibney’s documentary, Mayer reported, “had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation.” And both Park Avenue and Citizen Koch were projects of the Independent Television Service, “the small arm of public television that funds and distributes independent films…ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure. Its mandate is to showcase opinionated filmmakers who ‘take creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on public or commercial television.’” These foundations represent a mission rather than a personal interest, and that mission is to create space and provide support for a range of ideas, rather than to advance particular arguments or worldviews. It’s a critically important role to fill, but it also means that those organizations have some disadvantages when they come up against the other funding model at stake here, in this case, the support of private donors.

As Mayer explains, in addition to his donations to Lincoln Center—where the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, bears his name—” In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.” Unlike ITVS, for example, which is designed specifically to produce content for public television, there are a lot of places David Koch can spend his money. And unlike ITVS, which has an ongoing mission of making sure that new points of view make it onto public television, a setup that means it’s going to have to expend political capital on behalf of its filmmakers on a regular basis, private donors like Koch are more likely to concentrate their leverage on a few issues, or a few pieces of content. If Koch can make a “seven-figure donation,” which Mayer reported he had planned to give to WNET before he resigned from the board, contingent on two hours of programming, while ITVS has to fight for many films—PBS has already aired 15 movies through ITVS’ Independent Lens program in 2013—ITVS is understandably going to be at a disadvantage, as is the Gates Foundation, which may be all too happy to fund a single film, but doesn’t necessarily want to be in the postion to cover a multi-million dollar hole.
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At 9PM tonight, PBS will air Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns. An adaptation of Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City’s Most Infamous Crimes, Central Park Five is a searing examination of the 1989 sexual assault on Trisha Meili, a crime for which five young men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam were convicted after coercive interrogations and wrongfully imprisoned. Though their convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes confessed to the attack on Meili, a civil suit filed by a number of the men in 2003 is still pending, the district attorney in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, still works for the city of New York, and the city attempted to subpoena outtakes and additional footage from the Burns’ film, an effort that was just recently blocked by a judge.

I spoke at length with Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Raymond Santana, one of the Central Park Five, in Pasadena in January. We discussed the role of the media in the case, the impact of courtroom sketches, and why Lederer, who the Burns’ believe had grave doubts about the prosecution, has never spoken about her involvement in the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think the movie is tremendous, and it’s wonderful to have all of you here. I wanted to start out by asking, one of the things that really struck me about the documentary that I’m not sure is completely explicit, but that really came across to me, was that New York in this time was a place that was not really safe for women or for young men of color, and this was a case that ended up pitting these two populations that were being poorly served against each other. I wasn’t sure if that was something you wanted to pull out explicitly or that was more interesting to have as an implicit thread.

Ken Burns: We took a lot, we made a lot of narrative decisions that were at least superficially different than other movies that we’d made, so in fact we were trusting that a lot of things would have to remain implicit and not explicit. Explicit could be explicated by narrative. And in this case what we felt would just contain as much of the story as possible, filled with all of its excruciating paradoxes and contradictions. Not the least of it is that. I think that’s a really good point, that the most vulnerable are in some ways the symbolic antagonists in this invented drama.

Sarah Burns: I think Craig Steven Wilder does a good job of giving you at least some sense of that, of the vulnerability of minority teenaged boys especially, as the people who were most likely to be victims of the crime that people were seeing and were concerned about. And that was something that was forgotten. That’s sort of an important thing to understand, both that that was happening, and the way the media was covering not only this case but the time in general was such that we were seeing those people who were most likely to be victims as the source of our problems and not the victims of them.
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Yesterday Joy Moses, one of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress, wrote about the importance of A Place At The Table, a documentary about food security, that premiered just as the sequester began, cutting hundreds of thousands of recipients from the Women Infants and Children food program. And so I was struck today when AV Club critic Scott Tobias used the movie as a hook to argue that we’re more tolerant of stylistic stagnation in documentaries than we are in feature films, in part because we’re more likely to privilege the information in them over the way they’re presented. He writes:

I’ve often argued that the “movieness” of movies is undervalued—that we accept the indifferent, workmanlike craft of deliberate mediocrities over flashier, more conspicuous failures. But the “movieness” of documentaries rarely becomes an issue, which only encourages the stereotype of the documentary as a hearty gruel of talking heads and archival footage, spooned out as artlessly as the school lunches A Place At The Table criticizes so vociferously.

The thinking that documentaries need merely to seek or present some kind of truth, regardless of how those truths are presented, strikes me as dated at a time when the elasticity of the format is constantly being tested. Why should documentaries be forgiven any more than fiction films for failing to use the medium expressively or dynamically? Why give a pass to bland info-dumps like A Place At The Table?

I was curious to read the piece, in part because since I got back from the Sundance film festival, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what makes an effective documentary. One thing I think Scott may not necessarily be acknowledging about A Place At The Table is that, to a certain extent, it is a deviation from the norm to turn the camera on poor people and to treat them as if they’re experts, even if only on their own experiences. And I think I’m significantly more tolerant than he is of using documentary film to make arguments, something he acknowledges that he’s leaving out “entire categories of documentary unaccounted for, like acts of investigative journalism (the Paradise Lost movies, for example) or essays both personal (like the films of Ross McElwee or Michael Moore) and editorial (like Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job or No End In Sight),” though I’m surprised that he’s comfortable with Kirby Dick’s powerful The Invisible War, a movie I think is as polemic and argumentative, and as designed to provoke action as much as A Place At The Table is. But I want to make a different argument: attention to the craft of filmmaking can strengthen documentary film’s ability to convey facts and to convince audiences. But it can also trade off with getting the facts across in a way that’s not just dishonest: it’s damaging.

I was struck most strongly by this problem watching Zhao Qi’s Fallen City at Sundance. The film is a beautifully-shot exploration of how a number of families are trying to rebuild their lives after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, an 8.0 magnitude event that killed 68,000 people in the region. Its lingering shots of buildings that have literally sunk into the earth, often shot from the hills far above the city where the movie is set, images of ruined structures being taken back by trees and grass, and chronicles of the construction of a replacement city are both gorgeous as photography and give a strong psychological sense of what it must be like to have your entire world disappear in front of you. But for all the time the movie spends on these striking visuals, Zhao literally never once mentions a factor that is critically important to understanding why the devastation is so severe, and why his subjects are responding to the events the way they are: in the earthquake, schoolrooms collapsed at a rate disproportionate to other construction, killing rural children at a high rate, and leading many parents and activists to believe that corruption contributed to shortcuts in school construction.
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“Are you aware that I exist?” is one of the last—and most uncomfortable—lines uttered in A Place At The Table, which arrived in movie theaters, iTunes, and Amazon on March 1. Spoken by Barbie Izquierdo, one of the advocates trained by Witnesses to Hunger, a group that organizes low-income women to tell their own stories to policymakers, it’s a reminder of how invisible food insecurity is in American life and American policy-making, a state of affairs that A Place At The Table tries to correct. Watch an exclusive clip of the movie here:

The movie does what good documentaries are supposed to do. It attaches faces to the statistics, giving humanity to the 50 million Americans living with food insecurity. A Place At The Table features testimony from a mother in a northern city who relies on food stamps, still can’t help make ends meet, and wonders if hunger was the cause of her son’s developmental delays; a family in Colorado that includes an elementary school-aged child who can’t concentrate in school because she is hungry and fantasizing about food; and a child in a Mississippi family suffering from obesity and related health problems while her family struggles to purchase food.

But A Place at the Table isn’t just trying to score sympathy points. It’s full of experts, like Center for American Progress fellow Joel Berg, who tease out the issues that have left its subjects short of food. Some of these policy decisions are simply bad math, like the gap between benefits levels and what families actually need to meet their food needs, or insufficient investments in school meals. And others are larger cultural decisions, like agribusiness subsidies that incentivize the production of unhealthy crops, and Reagan-era budget cuts that increased reliance on overstretched charities, a response that resembles individual citizens showing up to a blazing fire with buckets of water. .

These issues, and Barbie’s question, are particularly salient at this moment, when the sequester is literally taking food from people’s mouths: 600,000 people will be cut from the Women Infants and Children (WIC) food program in FY 2013. And a pending reauthorization could take at least another $4.5 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

The team behind A Place At The Table has goals beyond simply getting the film in theaters. They’re holding screenings for stakeholders on food security issues. And the filmmakers have also partnered with the nation’s major food organizations, including Bread for the World, Feeding America, the Food Research and Action Center, and Share Our Strength. When individuals seek more information about the film online, they are provided with an avenue to “take action” which adds them to the email list of the food organizations, offers a hotline number that will help them to connect to their member of Congress, and provides information about locations where they can volunteer in their community. Rather than those individual citizens showing up with buckets, A Place At The Table is trying to turn its audience into a fire brigade.

Joy Moses is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Poverty and Prosperity program at American Progress.

Over at Vulture, Amanda Dobbins has an interesting post responding to the criticism of Life Is But A Dream, the documentary Beyoncé Knowles produced about herself and largely drawn from footage she either shot of herself via webcam and had shot for her as part of her efforts to archive her life, that it’s boring and stage-managed, a testament to Beyoncé’s perfectionism rather than genuinely revealing. Dobbins suggests that it’s a rebuke to the culture of celebrity meltdown:

Life Is But a Dream is nothing but an exercise in public togetherness; even the webcam confessionals and a tender speech about her miscarriage can’t hide the obvious calculation behind the self-directed film. This is Beyoncé propaganda, a 90-minute self-paean to a pop star whose name is synonymous with control. What’s interesting — interesting enough that Beyoncé feels the need to address it in her own hagiography — is that “control” has become a bad word.

“I don’t have to kill myself and be so hard on myself,” Beyoncé says of her perfectionism at one point. You can take that as a stab at self-improvement, or you can interpret it as a savvy attempt to answer her critics in the middle of a film designed to reinforce her Perfect image. It’s probably a little bit of both — if anything, Life Is But a Dream teaches us that Beyoncé is not much more than a construct of recorded footage. (She is filming herself all the time, after all. Even in the elevator.) But it highlights a troubling celebrity truth: Somehow, being perfect — onstage, on-camera, even at home — is not enough. We expect to see our pop stars fade, even as we shame them for it. We want Britney to fall apart again on national television. We want to lecture Rihanna about her romantic choices. We want unfiltered and “real” celebrity access until we get it, and then we want to punish the celebrities for it, because humanity is a pop-star sin, too.

Tyler Lewis, a dear friend of the blog, and a non-Beyoncé fan had a rather different reaction, that Life Is But A Dream gave him his first real sense of who she is, and how it affects her music:

I didn’t get the sense that she wasn’t interested in being truly vulnerable so much as unpracticed at it. I have this profound sense that this is a 31-year old woman who has never allowed herself, or been allowed, to feel deeply. So this film is an exercise I think in watching her learn to be vulnerable. There’s that moment where she says, almost surprising herself, that she can’t do it alone. Or the way she conveyed more deeply the hurt she feels that people would think she would fake a pregnancy than she does relating what it must have been like to have had a miscarriage.

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In Mother Jones today, Kate Sheppard has the news that Dr. George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita, shuttered after he was murdered at his church in 2009, will be reopening under the leadership of Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller when he was alive. In Burkhart’s conversation with Sheppard, she says that she decided to reopen the clinic in part because no one else would do it, and because she wants to reframe the debate about abortion care. “I think abortion is about motherhood,” she said. “Abortion is about motherhood because by and large women coming in to have abortions are concerned about the kind of life and the future for their children. Women are thinking in a very responsible manner when choosing that.”

These are important points, and ones made at greater length in one of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January, After Tiller. By first-time directors Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, After Tiller spends time not just with the four remaining doctors in the United States who are willing to perform late-term abortions—Burkhart’s clinic will not—but with many of their patients. It’s a set of perspectives that rarely enters the national debate about the legality of abortion procedures. The testimony of women and men who badly wanted children who have grown too sick to survive, and of doctors who help them when almost no one else will, may not convince the people who protest outside the four doctors’ clinics, and for whom the questions involved have simple and obvious answers.

But for anyone else watching the film, it will be clear, as Dr. Susan Robinson says, that no one ever wants an abortion, particularly not the kind that she and her colleagues provide. And the doctors in After Tiller are providing their services not out of some sort of attraction to the procedure that’s become their calling card, but out of a conviction that women shouldn’t be abandoned in their decision-making processes. After Tiller is a powerful reminder that abortion in America is less about desire than about need, and a matter not of carelessness, but the result of dreadful deliberations.

Many of the patients who agreed to have their consultations with the doctors filmed in After Tiller are facing the prospect of aborting children they planned to have, but whose pregnancies have gone terribly awry along the way. “It just didn’t seem fair to her,” say the parents of one child who would live in agonizing pain if she were born. Another describes a dreadful dilemma, saying “It’s guilt because we’re doing what we’re doing and guilt because if we brought him into this world he wouldn’t have any quality of life.” Monica, a patient whose child was diagnosed at 25 weeks with a debilitating illness that would cause his certain death if he were born, ultimately chooses to have an abortion rather than delay an inevitable decision to end her child’s life—better now, she ultimately decides, than to make him suffer before turning off his respirator so she can have had the experience of his brief, agonizing life. “It is hurtful because it was a planned pregnancy, and I did want this,” another patient explains.

Much of the focus of the consultations and on the planning for these families’ abortions is focused on giving them dignity and helping them process their emotions, both before and after their procedures. “The only time they get to say hello to their baby is when they have to say goodbye to it, too,” Dr. Robinson explains. As she runs through a checklist to help a couple prepare for their abortion and the burial arrangements for their child, I started to cry in the theater when the shot showed that “blanket requested” was one of the options on the list. There’s an incredible cruelty to the genetic lottery that forces parents to convert receiving blankets to burial shrouds, and an incredible courage to those parents who have their only time with a child after that child has died. Dr. Shelley Sella counsels two couples with ill children together, telling them “Both of you have babies who are really sick, and both of you have babies who would suffer a lot,” and giving them an opportunity to see that their experience is neither solitary nor shameful.
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I’ve been writing about The Invisible War, Kirby Dick’s documentary about the sexual assault epidemic in the military, since I saw it at Sundance last year. And now that it’s been nominated for an Academy Award, Dick and I sat down to discuss the movie’s impact, which Dick said had been a surprise:

Even before Hagel’s promise, The Invisible War was getting traction within the military itself, where it’s become a training tool and an agent of cultural change. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh screened The Invisible War for a meeting of wing commanders in November. And the rank and file are seeing the movie as well. Dick says that a distributor he works with who sells movies to the military and other institutions estimates that 235,000 service members—or nearly 10 percent of the 2.9 million members of the active and reserve armed forces—saw The Invisible War in 2012.

“The military itself is using the film for sexual-assault training, in part because, of course, they have no tools,” Dick said. “Eighty-five percent of those [viewers] are men. I think men seeing this is the real game changer, too. I think the film, not only on a policy level but on a cultural level, [is changing] the military. What people would joke about, you see this film and you don’t joke about it anymore.”

For all Dick is shocked by the failures of legislators and the military to act sooner, and by the Washington press corps for failing to investigate sexual assaults at Marine Barracks Washington—“There are documents, there is a lot of stuff there,” he said—he remains hopeful that the military can change, and that the rest of society can as well.

“The military’s done this before with racism. They could do it with this issue. And they could actually become a leader on the issue of sexual assault for the entire society,” he said. “There’s such divisiveness within this country, and especially around the military. There are a lot of issues with the military. But I think it’s a wonderful thought to think that civilians in society will look to the military as having been a leader in helping to reduce sexual assault across the country.”

It’s true that it’s easier—and probably better—for this to happen with documentaries than with feature films, television shows, or novels. But The Invisible War is one of the reasons I write about popular culture. You need narratives to push policy ideas forward. You need characters, be they human or fictional, to embody the impact of policies, or the lack thereof. And sometimes, people who have been deaf to the stories told by real people in their lives can hear those stories more clearly from the remove of a movie screen.

The sexual abuse of parishioners—particularly children—by members of the clergy has become a defining scandal for the Catholic Church, changing the dynamics between priests and their flocks as lay Catholics demand accountability from Rome. But before crises in Boston and other American cities, a group of brave, deaf men in Milwaukee began speaking out in the 1970s about a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused as many as 200 of them. Mea Maxima Culpa, a new documentary about their experiences and their courage, premieres on HBO at 9PM tonight.

I spoke to Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning director of Mea Maxima Culpa about how to record interviews with deaf subjects, the need for transparency in Catholicism, and how the Catholic Church functions like Enron. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I grew up in the Boston area, so I’m familiar with the breadth of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse issues. But I was curious, how did you come to this particular story about clergy sexual abuse when there are so many?

Well, I mean, I grew up in Boston too, for that matter. But actually I came to this story because I read it in the New York Times. What impressed me about it were two things. One was the connection between the Milwaukee story and the policies of the Vatican. That was a revelation that hadn’t been properly known at this point. And two was the heroes at the heart of the story, who I didn’t think had been properly celebrated. We hear a lot about victims. We don’t hear a lot about heroes…

They were protesting forcefully despite their handicap, and despite rather major prejudices towards the deaf. There’s a deposition, as you saw in the film, in which Archbishop William Cousins is asked “Why didn’t you reach out to ascertain whether these allegations of abuse were true for the victims?” And he was like, “The victims were deaf. What would they have to say?”

Do you think that Father Murphy decided to work in the deaf community because he would have access to children who were doubly vulnerable?

There’s a dstinction to be drawn in this film between the pedophiles and the coverup. I regard him as the classic predator. A compulsive sexual deviant who was a predator in the way he went after children. Predators tend to look at places where they can go after their prey as easily as possible. Predators tend to hide in plain sight, in a place where they can have access to a lot of victims. He was the interlocutor between their parents and the kids. That was really terrifying. On the part of Murphy, anyway, I think it was a lot of predatory behavior. But he used the church, and he used his skills. You can’t look at this situation and say Murphy became powerful in the deaf community in order to be able to prey on children. I think he also very much cared about the deaf community and a lot of people in the deaf community supported him because he had raised so much money. I think we have to see this as part and parcel of how predators hide in plain sight.

What do you think that Catholic reformers can learn from this protest about how to change the church and hold it accountable?

The only way to extricate is to expose. Any institution that claims that the only way to protect itself is to cover up crimes isn’t protecting itself, it’s just digging deeper into a culture of criminality. If you’re a company and you discover a culture of criminality in your company, say, Enron, do you cover it up, or do you bring it forward and say our reputation is important, but rooting out crime is even more important, and therefore convincing everyone that your reputation as an upstanding company should be upheld?
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It’s easy to dismiss reality television as a table-flipping, backbiting, redneck-baiting mess, to judge by some of the shows that top the ratings and garner press that ranges from clucking disapproval to horrified fascination. But one of the best things about the cable presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour, which I’ll be at until January 16, is a reminder of just how big the landscape is, and how much fascinating, substantive reality and documentary programming is coming up over the next six months. These are the five shows and documentaries that I’m most looking forward to after hearing their creators and casts talk to us in Pasadena:

1. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God, HBO, February 4: Alex Gibney’s documentaries are always fierce and compelling. But he’s found a particularly enraging and moving subject in this novel take on the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church: the attacks on a group of boys at a Catholic school for the deaf, by a priest who was the rare hearing person at the time to speak American Sign Language, an ability that enhanced his sense of priestly authority. Watching the men talk about their experiences as children, and what it meant to them to gather the courage to write to the Vatican to testify to their abuse, to find each other and learn they weren’t alone, and even to confront Father Murphy, who managed to convince the Vatican to let him stay a priest by arguing that he’d repented, is shattering and triumphant. They are, as Gibney put it during the panel for the movie, “people who were voiceless in the hearing world, who nevertheless had their voices heard.”

2. The President’s Gatekeepers, Discovery, July TBD: From Jules and Gédéon Naudet, brothers who were working on a documentary about New York firefighters on September 11 and ended up making 9/11, an insider perspective on the tragedy instead, this documentary includes interviews with all 19 living White House Chiefs of Staff. Executive producer Chris Whipple said it was fascinating to see how, despite the extreme partisan reputations of Chiefs ranging from Dick Cheney, who worked for President Ford, to Rahm Emanuel, the job itself, which most of the Chiefs described as the hardest they’d ever had, involved intense bipartisan cooperation. And the Naudets promise fascinating inside stories, like Bill Daley’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Apparently, Daley asked Obama to postpone the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner, but Obama demurred, insisting that everything proceed as normal. During the dinner, Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet got an email that his White House tour had been cancelled, and started asking Daley if something momentous was underfoot. Daley told him a pipe had burst in the White House and promised to personally conduct the tour at a later date. The rest is history.

3. March To Justice, Investigation Discovery, February TBD: I’ll be fascinated to see this movie, if only to see more of Carolyn McKinstry, a survivor of the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing—and a subsequent bombing of her home. At the panel on Saturday, she spoke about the psychological toll of the bombing, and changes in trauma treatment for children in the years since, where early psychological intervention has become the norm. “There was not that type of opportunity for us back then. In fact, we didn’t even talk about this bombing in my home. The only people I talked with were the FBI. They came through regularly, asked questions, and recorded your answers,” she explained. “But my parents didn’t talk about — they didn’t say, ‘Are you afraid? Do you want to talk about what happened? Do you miss your friends?’ We didn’t talk about it at home. I went to school Monday morning at 8:00. No one said anything. It wasn’t mentioned ever at church, at home, or at school.” She’s a powerful reminder that the past isn’t really past, and that we’re grappling not just with the policy implications of the Civil Rights movement, but with the direct and personal memories of people who lived through it.

4. Inside Combat Rescue, Nat Geo, February TBD: One of the aspects of war that’s least reflected in popular culture is the logistics it takes to wage one, whether it’s the actual size and complexity of American forward operating bases, or the supply chains it takes to keep soldiers armed, fed, rested, and protected. For that reason alone, I’m fascinated by Inside Combat Rescue, which documents the efforts of the medical teams who head out in helicopters, retrieve, stabilize, and bring American soldiers back from the front lines of our current conflicts. I’ll be curious to learn more about how Nat Geo worked out the ethics of filming wounded subjects. But it’s a powerful illustration of the cost of war.