The Ponce family’s hardscrabble circus has lived and performed on the back roads of Mexico since the 19th century, but can their way of life survive into the 21st? “Circo” (Circus) intimately portrays the Ponce family circus as it struggles to make a living from its artistry, sweat and wit against the backdrop of Mexico’s collapsing rural economy.
Watch Independent Lens: Circo Friday, May 4, 2012 at 10pm.
Watch Meet the Ponce Family Circus! on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.
The Kennedys: American Experience is a saga of ambition, wealth, family loyalty and personal tragedy. From Joseph Kennedy’s rise on Wall Street, through John, Robert and Edward’s successes and scandals, the family has left a storied political legacy.
Watch Thursday, May 2, 2012 at 8pm.
American manufacturing has undergone a massive revolution over the past 20 years, becoming — gloomy perceptions to the contrary — the number-one manufacturing nation on Earth. Cross the country with host Yul Kwon to look at traditional and not-so-traditional types of manufacturing. Along the way, meet the men and women who create the world’s best and most iconic products, engineers who are reinventing the American auto industry, steelworkers who brave intense heat to accommodate radical new ideas about recycling and engineers who are re-imagining the microchip. Visit a small start-up company that is building personalized robots — machines that may one day reshape our homes and offices. Investigate the emerging notion that manufacturing itself is changing — from a system based on the movement and assembly of raw materials to a system in which ideas and information are the raw materials of a new economy.
Watch America Revealed Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 9pm.
On April 2, 1936, when the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper entered the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, he was, he later remembered, barely able to control his anger. “I was angry because of the insults that Hitler and the other German leaders had hurled at me and my Negro teammates on the Olympic squad.” The young athlete would channel his raw emotions into some of the most remarkable achievements in the history of athletics, winning four gold medals. To tell the story of Owens’ remarkable victories in the face of Nazi racism, this film begins in the poor Cleveland neighborhood where the young athlete grew up; details his early career; describes Adolf Hitler’s outsized ambitions for the 1936 Olympics; explores the movement in Western democracies to boycott the event; and explains the pressures on Owens to attend. The film also reveals the unlikely relationship Owens struck up at the games with his German rival Carl “Luz” Long and shows, that in the end, despite his success in Germany, Owens struggled to find a place for himself in a United States that was still wrestling to overcome its own deeply entrenched racism.
Watch American Experience Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 7pm.
Watch Jesse Owens Preview on PBS. See more from American Experience.
