Discover how the ancestors of business mogul Richard Branson and architects Maya Lin and Frank Gehry took audacious risks to create opportunities, and how their luck, ingenuity and chutzpah was passed on to these three visionaries.

Our systems are failing the potential and future of young people who experience foster care or homelessness. The Mockingbird Society is working to change that. Using its youth-adult partnership model, Mockingbird develops young people who have experienced foster care or homelessness into leaders and advocates who develop and advance policy reforms. Mockingbird’s youth advocates safely share their experiences as they advocate passionately for a brighter...

Deserted by her husband and with four children to support, 24-year-old Sushma, from a remote village in Nepal, was sold into sexual slavery. Her trafficker took her to Kolkata, but she managed to escape. In this film we document how difficult it is for Nepal to stanch the flow of young women being trafficked each year across an open 1,500-mile-long border with India. Meet some of the women on the frontline who are trying to put a stop to the trade....

After the New Cross fire and the Black People's Day of Action, tensions between the community and the police escalated when a massive stop-and-search operation was launched, targeting black people on the streets of Brixton. In April, the situation boiled over into one of the biggest riots in British history. Buildings were burned down and hundreds of police injured. Riots then flared up all over the country, from Southall to Toxteth, but by the year's...

The fourth documentary in the collection focuses on the omnipresence of spirituality in the Greater Mekong. The values of prosperity, as they are enhanced by the Western World, are in complete opposition with the values of renouncement of material wealth commended by Buddhist philosophy. As a matter of fact, over 90 % of the population of the Greater Mekong is Buddhist. The region is full of temples and pagodas because the spirits, the gods and the...

In the aftermath of the Revolution, a newly independent America confronted one of its most daunting challenges: how to build a united nation out of thirteen disparate colonies. This program profiles the passionate crusade launched by Thomas Jefferson and continued by Noah Webster, Horace Mann, and others to create a common system of tax-supported schools that would mix people of different backgrounds and reinforce the bonds of democracy. A wealth...

What is the price for a room full of pageant trophies? In this powerful program-part indictment, part testimonial-the ultra-competitive world of beauty pageantry is presented from the perspective of those who walk the runway. Teenage girls from a cross-section of ethnic backgrounds open their hearts about life as a beauty queen, discussing the pressure to fulfill a societal ideal, the allure of celebrity, and the artificiality of the modeling trade....

Journalist turned psychologist Darcy Lockman offers a bracing look at the most pernicious problem facing modern parents-how egalitarian relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced into the household. In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data shows that one area of gender inequality stubbornly persists: the disproportionate amount of parental work that falls on women, no matter their...

This follow up documentary to KKK: The Fight for White Supremacy sees filmmaker Dan Murdoch back in the USA to revisit some of the people he met from the Ku Klux Klan and also meet members of the Black Liberation Movement. Having previously documented clashes between these two opposing visions of America—a resurgent KKK and a growing Black Power movement—his aim now is to find out what black power means, what its motivations are and why this movement...

In July 1998, Jim Lehrer moderated a panel discussion with President Bill Clinton called "A Dialogue on Race." The one-hour roundtable was wide-ranging and nuanced, and touched on both the roots of discrimination and the obstacles in finding solutions.