Passport
A diverse voices viewing marathon on PBS Wisconsin Passport
December 27, 2024 Leave a Comment
Despite the joy of the winter holidays, they are often accompanied by a frenzied time of travel, food preparation, child care and innumerable forms of work to close-out the calendar year. Our retail and logistics workers experience some of their their busiest days and weeks, and our essential workers, as always, tend to us throughout the season.
Our hope is that everyone, at some point, gets time to rest and slow down before the pace of a new year takes hold. For some of us, rest means making delicious hot chocolate, finding a cozy blanket, and settling in to watch some rich and thought provoking TV. If this is you, PBS Wisconsin Passport has you covered.
Here are six of our editors’ favorite Passport picks from the PBS Wisconsin Diverse Voices collection. They deliver a streaming video marathon packed with affecting, long-form storytelling about contemporary Indigenous Americans, San Francisco’s Chinatown during a historic turn-of-the-century public health crisis, and people trying to thrive with the disabling affects of Parkinson’s disease. Our picks also chronicle the long history of the churches that are bedrocks of our Black communities, and bring us stories from the working hands of Mumbai fisherman and Oaxacan reforestation laborers. Together, we hope these selections help you greet 2025 with even greater empathy, knowledge, connection and curiosity.
Against the Tide | POV
From director/producer Sarvnik Kaur, Against the Tide follows Mumbai fishermen Rakesh and Ganesh, inheritors of the great Koli knowledge system — a way to harvest the sea by following the moon and the tides. Rakesh has kept faith in traditional methods while Ganesh has embraced technology. The film is a tale of deep friendship and rising resentment between two men against the backdrop of an adoring sea, now turning hostile through climate change.
Watch the entire program with PBS Wisconsin Passport.
The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song
In 2021, Henry Louis Gates Jr. brought us an intimate four-hour series on a historic and enduring spiritual, social and political bedrock of our Black communities. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song explores the 400-year-old story of the Black church in America, the changing nature of worship spaces, and the men and women who shepherded them from the pulpit, the choir loft, and church pews.
In Episode 1, Gates explores the roots of African American religion beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the extraordinary ways enslaved Africans preserved and adapted their faith practices from the brutality of slavery to emancipation. Episode 2 follows how the Black church expanded its reach to address social inequality and minister to those in need, from the Jim Crow South to the civil rights movement and the Black church’s role in the present.
Native America | Season 2
PBS delivered the second season of its series Native America in the fall of 2023. Too often represented as part of our country’s past as opposed to its present, the four episodes of season 2 offer a groundbreaking portrait of contemporary Indigenous America. They follow the brilliant engineers, bold politicians and cutting-edge artists who draw upon Native tradition to build a better 21st century.
Watch season 2 of Native America with PBS Wisconsin Passport.
A Thousand Pines | Independent Lens
From producer/directors Noam Osband and Sebastian Diaz Aguirre, A Thousand Pines (2023) is an intimate portrait of a hidden world following a crew of Mexican guest workers over the course of a season planting trees throughout the United States. The crew struggles to balance the job’s physical demands and its extreme isolation with remaining connected to the life they are providing for back home. As the season progresses, they become a small family, cooking and caring for each other in order to endure the punishing work. The film centers on the crew foreman, Raymundo Morales, who is in his 19th season working for the largest reforestation company in the United States.
Watch the full documentary with PBS Wisconsin Passport.
Plague at the Golden Gate | American Experience
American Experience delivers a history at the intersection of public health crisis, Asian America and the rise of Asian hate with Plague at the Golden Gate. More than 100 years before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world and set off a wave of fear and anti-Asian sentiment, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900 unleashed a similar furor. It was the first time in history that civilization’s most feared disease — the infamous Black Death — made it to North America. Two doctors — vastly different in temperament, training and experience — used different methods to lead the seemingly impossible battle to contain the disease before it could engulf the country.
Watch the full program in English, Chinese, or Spanish with PBS Wisconsin Passport.
Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s | Independent Lens
In Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s, three people navigate their lives with resourcefulness and determination in the face of a disabling and degenerative illness, Parkinson’s disease. An optician pursues deep brain stimulation surgery; a mother raising a pre-teen daughter becomes a boxing coach and an advocate for exercise; and a cartoonist contemplates how he will continue to draw as his motor control declines.
Watch the full program with PBS Wisconsin Passport.
Independent Lens POV The Black Church Asian American PBS Wisconsin Voices diverse voices PBS Wisconsin diverse voices
