Wide Angle's blog

Here's a quick preview of "Crossing Heaven's Border," the season premier of Wide Angle's first televised episode of the season, which airs on PBS tonight in the United States. You can learn more about this episode here or view more content from Wide Angle on Passport here:

North Korean defectors take a life-threatening journey traveling thousands of miles through China, Laos and Thailand, in the hope of settling as free citizens in South Korea. Intrepid South Korean journalists risk their own lives to capture the action and emotion.

 

The latest video from PBS Wide Angle's ongoing online series, Focal Point:

In January 2009, Waterford Crystal went bankrupt. The company’s main factory, in Waterford, Ireland, was closed, and 480 people were fired. Many of them had worked there for more than forty years. But the Waterford workers refused to give up their jobs without a fight. They staged a sit-in that lasted for almost two months, demanding that they get their jobs back or, at the very least, that some manufacturing of this iconic brand remain in Ireland. FOCAL POINT’s Raise the Last Glass follows two Waterford workers as they fight to save both their jobs and a bit of Irish heritage.

As part of our partnership with PBS's Wide Angle, we present this sneak preview of the latest episode of their online-exclusive series Focal Point. The full version of this episode will be online tomorrow on Wide Angle's site.

 

As North Korea’s relations with its neighbors grow increasingly strained, FOCAL POINT trains its lens on one of the 15,000 North Korean defectors who have made it to South Korea. Twenty-year-old Haejung (not her real name) was smuggled out of North Korea some years ago in the hope of a better life -- leaving her family behind. She now attends Hangyeore High School, a special boarding school an hour outside of Seoul, founded in 2006 to help North Korean teens adjust to life in the South.

Most of the school's 240 students are separated from one or both of their parents back in the North, with little hope of ever seeing them again. They experience severe culture shock transitioning from one of the world's most isolated Communist states to one of the most technologically and economically advanced societies.

In Field Trip to the DMZ, the students make their annual trip to the border, and Haejung dreams of a time when her family and her homelands will be reunited.

Our friends at Focal Point, the Web-exclusive international documentary series from PBS's acclaimed program Wide Angle, have a new documentary up titled "Underground Zimbabwe." The episode brings you to the black markets and underground protest movements that struggle to survive under Robert Mugabe's regime. Here are some clips:

In Zimbabwe's Life Lines, we meet a young man who survives by selling
basic goods on the black market.

In Demonstrating Under Dictatorship we meet a women's
empowerment movement that stages non-violent street protests to for agitate bread-and-butter issues in defiance of repressive laws curtailing public gatherings:

They're also presenting an interview with Columbia University African studies professor and FP top public intellectual Mahmood Mamdani reflecting on Mugabe's legacy:

This post marks the beginning of a new collaboration between Passport and the award-winning PBS show Wide Angle. In the coming weeks, we will be featuring exclusive clips from their new online series Focal Point. -JK

Focal Point is a new online-exclusive series of documentary shorts from Wide Angle, public television’s Emmy-Award winning international affairs documentary series. Like Wide Angle, Focal Point offers a deeper understanding of forces shaping the world today through compelling human stories. Passport plans to feature video excerpts from upcoming episodes.

In the first episode of Focal Point, From Jihad to Rehab, Canadian journalist Nancy Durham takes us inside a rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia, where art therapy and religious re-education are being used to reform militant jihadists, like Ahmed al-Shaya, who went to Iraq on a suicide mission in 2004 where he killed 12 people but survived himself. We meet Juma Al-Dossary who has just returned to Saudi Arabia after spending six years in Guantanamo, and speak with Dr. Awad Alymai, the detainees’ art therapist, about his patients’ transformation.

Here's a clip:

See the full episode here.