Episode 1
Absolutely Positive
June 18, 1991
Peter Adair asks 11 people — women and men, gay and straight, from all walks of life — to share their stories about having HIV. Alternately irreverent, candid and soulful, this stirring film is not about being sick; it is about being true to the emotional complexity of being mortal.
Episode 2
Marc and Ann
June 25, 1991
Marc Savoy knows only one way to talk about Cajun music -- with the same passion and conviction as the music itself. Legendary filmmaker Les Blank delves directly into the heart of Cajun country to portray a couple devoted to the preservation of Louisiana French culture in both their personal and public lives. The joy of Cajun music, its signature yelps and wails, filter through many of the kitchens, porches, and dance halls of the Savoys' Eunice, LA, community.
Episode 3
Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song
June 25, 1991
Plena is in Puerto Rico what the blues are in the U.S.: a musical expression abounding with romance, daily news, and personal sagas. As the Puerto Rican community grows on the mainland, the infectious rhythms of Puerto Rico's most original contribution to Caribbean urban music are celebrated with gusto.
Episode 4
Twinsburg, OH: Some Kind of Weird Twin Thing
June 25, 1991
Every year 2,500 sets of twins gather in Twinsburg, Ohio for Twins Days. Most are dressed alike, many live together, and all seem to have rhyming names. Standing out amidst the lighthearted contests and games are filmmaker Sue Marcoux and her sister Michele, separated by 3,000 miles and a lifetime of anti-twin behavior.
Episode 5
Honorable Nations
July 2, 1991
For 99 years, the residents of Salamanca, N.Y. have rented the land under their homes for an average of $1/year from the Seneca Indians, under the terms of a lease imposed by Congress. Now, as the lease is about to expire, a century of bad business must be renegotiated. The survival of an American town and justice for the Senecas appear to be in conflict.
Episode 6
Chemical Valley
July 9, 1991
A series of accidents at a West Virginia chemical plant producing the same deadly toxins that caused the disaster in Bhopal, India, has alarmed area residents. But the area's fragile economy depends on the jobs provided by the plant, dividing the community.
Episode 7
Sea of Oil
July 9, 1991
The Exxon Valdez disaster left far more than a soiled coastline in its wake. Grief, suspicion, anger and greed oozed through the small, formerly pristine town of Valdez. The human toll of an environmental nightmare is evoked in a haunting film which Exxon and the City of Valdez attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress.
Episode 8
Turn Here Sweet Corn
July 9, 1991
A search for meaning beyond cliches and nostalgia, as a family farm is lost to speculative suburban real estate developers. The camera moves through a Minnesota corn field and finds a photograph of a suburban tract clothes-pinned to a cornstalk. Layered with visual and emotional paradoxes, the film juxtaposes innovative video techniques with slices of a simpler, threatened life, in an emotional and personal reflection on the colonization of cornfields by shopping malls.
Episode 9
Tongues Untied
July 16, 1991
Angry, funny, erotic and poetic by turns (and sometimes all at once), this exploration of what it means to be black and gay jumps from interview to confession, music video to documentary to poem.
Episode 10
Berkeley in the Sixties
July 23, 1991
From the Free Speech Movement to the anti-war protests to the last stand over People's Park, Berkeley, California became synonymous with a generation's quest for social, political, and cultural transformation.
Episode 11
A Little Vicious
July 30, 1991
A pit bull, his elderly master, and a dog trainer/philosopher form a curious love triangle. Elegantly crafted, wryly narrated by Kevin Bacon, and infused with a blend of humor and pathos, Immy Humes' dog-umentary is a quirky, off-beat gem of a film.
Episode 12
The Big Bang
August 6, 1991
Whether the subject is sex, death, madness or God, The Big Bang never lets up in its weird and wonderful search for the meaning of it all.
Episode 13
Maria's Story
August 13, 1991
Maria Serrano, El Salvadoran wife, mother, and guerrilla leader, helps plan a major nationwide offensive that led to the historic peace pact of 1992. Skirting bullets and mortar attacks, recounting a childhood of poverty and abuse by government troops, suffering the tragic loss of her daughter to enemy fire, and spending precious moments with her husband and surviving daughters, Maria brings viewers to the heart of the fight for a more just society.
Episode 14
Homes Apart
August 20, 1991
Ten million families were separated between North and South Korea when the Korean War ended in 1953. Beginning with the story of one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, the film reveals the personal, social, and political dimensions of the last divided nation on earth.
Episode 15
Where the Heart Roams
July 30, 1991
Romance novels comprise nearly half the paperback books sold in America. Chiffon-shrouded, jewel-laden, flower-bedecked Barbara Cartland has written hundreds of them. And filmmaker George Csicsery has given his heart to this fascinating subculture where all the women are beautiful, all the men are mysterious, and all the endings are happy.
Episode 16
Casting the First Stone
September 3, 1991
Abortion has been at the center of one of the most dramatic and wrenching debates of our times, but the social forces and the changing lives behind the rhetoric are rarely explored. This film draws complex portraits of individuals on both sides of the controversy in a small town in Pennsylvania, where very different life experiences have shaped conflicting values and beliefs.
