Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

For 30 years, Lynn Novick has been directing and producing landmark documentary films about American culture, history, politics, sports, art and music. With co-director Ken Burns, she has created more than 80 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS, including The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War and Prohibition. This duPont–Columbia and Peabody-Award winning filmmaker’s new documentary series, College Behind Bars, reveals the transformative power of higher education through the experiences of men and women trying to earn college degrees while incarcerated. Executive produced by Ken Burns and produced by Sarah Botstein, College Behind Bars is Novick’s solo directorial debut and will air November 25 and 26 on PBS stations. The four-hour series, distilled from nearly 400 hours of cinéma vérité footage, explores the lives of a dozen incarcerated men and women as they struggle to earn degrees in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most rigorous and effective prison education program