Follows Life Stories’ recent Emmy win for Outstanding Short Documentary for THE SILENT WITNESS

Life Stories, a nonprofit media organization that produces films about people whose lives inspire meaningful change, announced the release of Season Two of THE THREAD, its flagship documentary interview series.

The News & Documentary Emmys honor television achievements from the 2023 calendar, chosen from more than 2,200 submissions by a judging body of more than 980 people who work in the television and streaming/digital media news and documentary industry.

Winners of the 45th News & Documentary Emmy Awards

Outstanding Short Documentary: “The Silent Witness” (Life Stories)

Life Stories Releases General Audience Edition on the 79th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

Life Stories, a nonprofit media organization that produces and distributes films about people whose lives inspire meaningful change, announced its film “The Silent Witness: A Survivor's Story of Hiroshima” has been nominated in the Outstanding Short Documentary category as part of the 45th Annual News & Documentary Emmy® Awards. To celebrate the nomination and honor victims of the attack on the 79th anniversary of the Hiroshima Atomic Bombing, Life Stories is releasing a new version of the Emmy-nominated documentary for general audiences.

Katie Couric is looking back at her early days in television news.

In a clip that PEOPLE can exclusively reveal from Life Stories' latest episode of its new YouTube documentary interview series The Thread, the journalist, 67, reflects on how she overcame the sexism she faced when she first began her career. "I think my early days in TV news were challenging, because it was very male-dominated in the 80s," she begins. "This was an era when cranky, old guys would wanna get the broads out of broadcasting, and I always joke that when I entered television news, harass was two words instead of one."

The Thread premieres weekly from March 4 to June 17 on YouTube.

A Common Sense Selection: Teens. Docuseries explores public figures' trials and triumphs.

Parents need to know that The Thread is a thought-provoking series that offers a deep dive into the lives of accomplished individuals and the historical events that shaped them. It tackles complex themes such as political unrest, personal trauma, sexual assault, and resilience in the face of adversity. The series provides a platform for discussion about overcoming obstacles, the importance of community, and recognizing one's worth and potential.

This docuseries brings to light the remarkable journeys of its famous subjects, combining personal achievements with significant historical events. 

Fox 11 in Los Angeles recently covered Life Stories and the release of its new series, The Thread. Producer and interviewer Nancy Steiner introduced viewers to the series and offered a preview of the upcoming documentary episode featuring Katie Couric. Watch the full clip in the below link.

Gloria Estefan is opening up about how music “allowed [her] to survive.” In Life Stories’ first episode of their new YouTube documentary interview series The Thread — which will feature interviews with the likes of Martin Sheen, Tony Hawk, Katie Couric and others — the three-time Grammy-winning singer discusses the impact music has had on her life and the purpose it gave her. “Music has never brought me anything but joy,” Estefan, 66, says in the interview preview for her episode “Gloria Estefan: Singing Through Struggles.”

“The Thread” will premiere weekly from March 4 - June 17 on YouTube.

Some of the most exceptional Americans in the arts, media, religion, and politics share their personal stories and life lessons in The Thread, a new documentary series coming to YouTube in March. Gloria Estefan, Martin Sheen, The Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, Katie Couric, actor Jason Alexander, and Sen. Mitt Romney are among the roster of personalities who sit down for probing conversations in the 16-part series produced by Life Stories, a nonprofit media organization that makes and distributes “films about people whose lives inspire meaningful change.”

One of the most joyous festival experiences I’ve had in recent years was my first visit to Heartland Film’s Oscar-qualifying Indy Shorts International Film Festival in 2019. It was the last major cinematic event I attended prior to the COVID-19 quarantine, and I cherished my memories of the familial warmth I felt from the community of movie makers and enthusiasts in Indianapolis during the years of isolation that followed.

Though the “Barbenheimer” double bills are currently—and deservedly—all the rage, a more fitting film to pair with Christopher Nolan’s latest is George and Teddy Kunhardt’s chilling documentary, “The Silent Witness.” Its eloquent and warmhearted subject is 91-year-old Tomiko Morimoto West, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima at age 13 and has devoted her life to speaking firsthand about the inhumanity of war.

Jonas Mekas, had he lived, would have been 101 this year, but Fragments of Paradise (Kunhardt Films) keeps him very much alive. To many, he was the Godfather of Experimental Cinema; to others, a friend, a mentor, and an inspiration. He was also a devoted father and husband. All those roles are seen in K.D. Davison’s wonderful documentary, which looks at Mekas’ career and dips into the endless hours of footage on which he recorded his everyday life on his 16mm Bolex camera. It’s this footage that tells his story most effectively.

This is more than just a biography, it is a beautiful portrait of a special individual, and many will identify with him as a human. For anyone interested in Underground cinema, this is essential viewing.

Abraham Lincoln‘s complex journey to end slavery will be explored in the upcoming docuseries from Apple TV+, Lincoln’s Dilemma. The four-parter, based on David S. Reynolds’ book Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, is set to premiere on Feb. 18. Through archival materials and insight from journalists, educators, and Lincoln scholars, the docuseries promises give a “voice to the narratives of enslaved people, shaping a more complete view of an America divided over issues including the economy, race, and humanity.”

Lincoln’s Dilemma is produced by Eden Productions and Kunhardt Films. Executive producers include Peter Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt, George Kunhardt, Josh Tyrangiel, Richard Plepler, Jacqueline Olive, Barak Goodman, and Jelani Cobb. Olive and Goodman direct the series.

Over the weekend, I set aside some time to watch “A Choice of Weapons,” HBO’s new documentary focused on Gordon Parks, the revolutionary photographer, writer and filmmaker whose works have inspired creative documentarians for decades. The new HBO film examines the legacy of Gordon Parks and other revolutionary photographers whose images are righteous tools in the fight against revisionism.

My favorite part of HBO’s Parks documentary comes in a comment from Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. As Stevenson describes a 1956 color photo series by Parks on segregation in Mobile, Alabama, he says the choice to use color photos — rather than black and white — was a political one. 

Timed to the former president’s 60th birthday, “Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union” seeks to be the definitive document on Barack Obama’s life and presidency, and at five-plus hours over three nights, mostly succeeds in that daunting task. 

Going back to Obama’s upbringing and early life, the documentary doesn’t gloss over aspects of those years that might not be entirely flattering, including a level of ambition that prompted him to push past older Democrats as he charted his road to the top. Even five hours requires plenty of tough choices, but Kunhardt has nicely encapsulated the Obama presidency, both for those who can remember it and generations to come.

For presidential historian Jon Meacham, a subtle but significant shift occurred between the publication of an essay in 2017 and the book that it inspired soon after. The essay in Time magazine was titled “American Hate, a History”  and he wrote it in the aftermath of the deadly gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meacham’s 2018 book — and subsequent HBO documentary arriving Tuesday, Oct. 27 — moved from those shadows into light with the title “The Soul of America.”

In the HBO documentary, Meacham serves as our guide to the case he makes in his book. For him, it was an easy yes when director KD Davison and Kunhardt Films made their pitch to adapt “The Soul of America.”

For more than thirty years, Bryan Stevenson has worked to bring justice to the justice system. Now, his fight is coming to HBO. True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality, a new documentary from HBO and Kunhardt Films, chronicles the ongoing efforts of the Equal Justice Initiative, founded by Stevenson, to bring impartiality and equality to the American criminal justice system.

True Justice remains Stevenson's only foray into the world of documentary. Part portrait of an activist and part exposé, the finished film is nothing short of a battlecry for change, backed by an army of nightmarish and under-discussed realities of a system that fails so many. In a conversation with Mashable, Stevenson shares what worried him about creating True Justice, how he hopes his work can change the world, and what viewers can do to support his cause.

Emmy award-winning documentary film-makers Peter, George and Teddy Kunhardt are known for taking sensitive subject matter to the next level by bringing the truth to light. The truth is a tricky subject often hard to hear, but the Kunhardts are warriors of educating and informing the world on earnest messages that need to be heard. That rings eerily true with their latest documentary, “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight For Equality” (premiering June 26). The new HBO film highlights Stevenson’s endless fight to advocate for the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned through an unjust and morally corrupt justice system. 

The Kunhardts sat down with Metro to discuss their latest film, delve into why Stevenson’s story is so compelling and highlight why we all must learn the truth about our country’s history before it repeats itself. 

Bryan Stevenson, an attorney and the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative who is the subject of the new HBO documentary "True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality," says that it is imperative that Americans confront the brutal, ugly truth of our country's history. Appearing on "CBS This Morning" Monday, he said, "I don't think we've really ever talked about the hardship, the legacy of enslaving black people for 2 1/2 centuries. We've just never dealt with the details of that. And because we didn't, we didn't understand the significance of that.

The new documentary includes his fight to create the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country's only memorial dedicated to lynching victims.

Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson wants Americans to look hard at the nation’s long, ongoing history of racism ― because, he says, without an honest acknowledgment of those wrongdoings, our past will be perpetuated in our present and we won’t be free to build a better future.

“True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality,” a new HBO documentary coming out June 26, digs into Stevenson’s work with the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, fighting racism in the criminal justice system for over 30 years, largely by defending poor, black people on death row.

Bryan Stevenson lives a fairly ascetic existence, devoting his time and energy to fighting institutional racism and social injustice as a lawyer. Yet Stevenson is turning into a media star: a best-selling author and the founder of a museum and memorial, he is now the subject of a new documentary, “True Justice”, which debuts Wednesday on HBO. Next up, Michael B. Jordan, of “Creed” and “Black Panther” fame, plays Stevenson in a feature film.

In the film, Stevenson argues that white Americans who participated in lynchings were terrorists and blacks who migrated north were exiles and refugees. “The scale of lawlessness and mob violence that killed thousands of African-Americans in these very public ways was terrorism. They brutalized the millions of black people who had to cope with that menace and that threat and that trauma,” he said.

Alabama has the highest death sentencing rate in the country per capita. What it doesn’t have: a public defender system. But it does have Bryan Stevenson, the attorney who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989 with a mission to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment. Stevenson is the subject of a new documentary, “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality,” which premieres on HBO on June 26.

In the documentary, which debuted at the American Film Institute’s AFI Docs festival yesterday (June 20), Stevenson makes the case that Alabama’s death penalty laws are akin to modern-day lynchings because race factors so heavily into the assigned sentences. He also talks about his experiences with the highest court in the land.

Though his name is in the title and incidents from his personal story are told, “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight For Equality” is not really a biographical documentary. A public interest lawyer who is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells us right off the bat that the phrase carved in stone on the U.S. Supreme Court building — Equal Justice Under Law — is way more than just words to him.

The Kunhardts are well-positioned to take on this story. Father Peter was the director of last year’s excellent “King in the Wilderness” documentary on Martin Luther King Jr.’s final years, and sons Teddy and George served as producers.

The American Film Institute on Wednesday revealed a full lineup for the AFI Docs 2019 Film Festival, its annual five day documentary festival featuring 72 films from 17 countries and 6 world premieres.

Opening the festival is True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality, directed by Peter, George and Teddy Kunhardt, which follows Stevenson's research into slavery, segregation and mass incarceration and his subsequent founding of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama.

For Peter Kunhardt, a six-time Emmy and a Peabody Award winner, collaboration with family is in his DNA. As Executive Producer and Director, Peter partners with two of his sons, Teddy and George, at Kunhardt Films to produce critically acclaimed and socially relevant documentaries about the people and ideas that shape our world.

After ten years as a producer at ABC News, Peter gave up the hectic commute to New York City and founded Kunhardt Productions in Westchester in 1987. His first film project for HBO, JFK: In His Own Words, was in collaboration with his father, Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., the longtime managing editor of Life Magazine. He had watched the toll that forty years of commuting from Chappaqua took on his father. Peter and his wife Suzy were raising their family in Chappaqua and he wanted to work closer to home.

AFI Docs 2019 will open with the world premiere of HBO’s True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s First For Equality. Directed and produced by Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt, the film provides an intimate portrait of Bryan Stevenson (pictured), founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief or release for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row. 

True Justice is a co-production between HBO and Kunhardt Films. Executive producers are Trey Ellis and Peter Kunhardt. For HBO, executive producers are Jacqueline Glover, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller.

AFI DOCS 2019 will open with the world premiere of HBO’s True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight For Equality, directed by Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt, and will close with Raise Hell: The Life & Times Of Molly Ivins, directed by Janice Engel. AFI DOCS runs June 19–23, 2019, in Washington, DC, and Silver Spring, MD.

TRUE JUSTICE: BRYAN STEVENSON’S FIGHT FOR EQUALITY: DIRS & PRODS Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt. USA. Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has dedicated his life to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned.  He and his staff have won reversals, relief or release for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row.  World Premiere.

HBO is set to air a documentary on the life of Bryan Stevenson, an Alabama public interest attorney who has led a fight against inequality for African Americans in the U.S.’s criminal justice system. The network announced Monday that “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality” will debut June 26 on the premium cable network and on their streaming platforms.

“True Justice” is a co-production of HBO and Kunhardt Films. It’s produced and directed by Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt. The film is executive produced by Trey Ellis and Peter Kunhardt, and edited and produced by Maya Mumma, ACE. Jacqueline Glover, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller are executive producing for HBO.

The work of Bryan Stevenson, the Alabama public interest attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, is getting the documentary treatment via HBO. The feature, which was directed by Emmy winners Peter, Teddy and George Kunhardt, is a portrait of Stevenson’s work in the criminal justice system, where he advocates on behalf of the poor and incarcerated, seeking to eradicate systemic racial discrimination. True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality will premiere June 26 on the network. 

True Justice is a co-production of HBO and Kunhardt Films. George Kunhardt and Kunhardt also produce, with Trey Ellis, Peter Kunhardt, Jacqueline Glover, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller acting as exec producers.

A conversation about King in the Wilderness with Executive Producer Trey Ellis and Columbia University Professor Jelani Cobb.

Sometimes we take for granted Atlanta’s living history as the home of civil rights. That was reinforced to me on the evening of Wednesday, Sept. 5 when the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation hosted a program featuring the documentary – King in the Wilderness – on the last three years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. The documentary was co-produced by HBO and the Kunhardt Film Foundation.

Peter Kunhardt, director of the Kunhardt Foundation, said that less than 5 percent of the interviews and research made it into the documentary. There now will be more than “39 hours of personal memories” in the interviews it had with 19 people that will be available digitally to public at large.

It is incredibly difficult to make a documentary on a high-profile subject that feels fresh; these kinds of films often either get caught up in chronicling every single life detail or rehash facts that are already well-known, rendering the viewing experience largely unnecessary. HBO‘s King in the Wilderness does not fall victim to these plights. Instead, it blows right past them, establishing its own unique tone from the very beginning and providing new insight to final years of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life.

Directed by Peter Kunhardt, King in the Wilderness doesn’t waste any time trying to get viewers up to speed with the biographical details of King’s life. Instead, we’re shown King at a lower moment, long after he’s smiled for all the photos we’ve seen a million times. 

It’s easy to make another documentary that further elevates the already-bolstered life and work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated 50 years ago this week in Memphis, when he was just 39 years old. The trickier task is to make a documentary that not only feels new but also brings King briefly back down to earth. Sometimes the best way to remember someone is as a human, faults and all.

Such is the careful result of “King in the Wilderness,” Peter Kunhardt’s empathetic and freshly revealing documentary airing Monday on HBO. Zeroing in on the last few years of King’s life, it acquaints viewers with a leader privately mired in self-doubt, who is physically and mentally exhausted by his own movement and challenged by the contradictory forces that threaten to undermine the progress already made. 

King in the Wilderness, a new documentary premiering Monday on HBO from Emmy winner Peter Kunhardt (Becoming Warren Buffett). The film, a patchwork of archival footage of King and present-day interviews with more than a dozen of the civil rights leader’s nearest and dearest, opens with a shot of the modest two-story brick home in Atlanta where King moved his family in 1965, and ends with one of his gravestone, inscribed with the gospel lyric: “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” These two images neatly bookend the last three years of his life, but they also gesture at a broader idea of King as a man who could not quite be contained—not by domesticity, which so often came second to the struggle; not by his fragile mortal coil; not even by the quest for civil rights, at least in the narrow way that others would have him define it.

It is almost exactly half a century to the day since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in a motel in Memphis, Tenn., and in that span he has been apotheosized into something close to legend. So much so, in fact, that we run the risk of not spending enough time with the actual man, of not knowing as much as we should about the controversial final years that reveal an individual more radical, and more disregarded, than he has been remembered.

Remedying that situation is the goal of the exceptional documentary “King in the Wilderness,” which employs a simple and straightforward method to extraordinary effect. As directed by Peter Kunhardt, and playing at Laemmle’s Playhouse in Pasadena before airing on HBO on April 2, the film made the decision to, in its own words, “have [King’s] friends sit down to recall the last years of his life.”

A searing portrait of the last 18 months of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life captures the Civil Rights leader in a purgatory of anxiety and conflict. 

“King in the Wilderness” is a provocative title for a Martin Luther King Jr. documentary, because it creates an image so counterintuitive it’s disarming. In the twelve years he strode across the national stage — from the end of 1955, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, through 1968, the year he was assassinated — King was a beacon of transcendent fire and radical moral courage. That was just as true during the last 18 months of his life, the period covered by Peter Kunhardt’s eye-opening, meticulous, and haunting movie. So why, during that time, was King in the wilderness?

Multiple Emmy winner Peter Kunhardt examines the conflicted period between the Voting Rights Act and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in his probing study for HBO, 'King in the Wilderness.'

Premiering at Sundance ahead of its HBO bow, the documentary taps into a regrettably still relevant debate as America backslides in the wake of last year’s Charlottesville protest, with white supremacist fringe groups newly emboldened in the Trump era. As such, the film’s message remains timely, shaped by the voices and vivid recollections of King’s intimate associates in the struggle for equality. As one interviewee puts it, quoting an African proverb: “If the surviving lions don’t tell their stories, the hunters will get all the credit.”