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Screen Time: Week of September 25

By Akiva Gottlieb


From 'Gaga: Five Foor Two. Courtesy of Netflix.'

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.

New to Netflix is Gaga: Five Foot Two, which goes beyond the glitter and the glam to learn more about the pop star Lady Gaga. Entertainment Weekly says the film "has a noirish glamour...Conversely, there are moments of raw and casual power."

Now available for rental at Vimeo is (IDA's own) Carrie Lozano and Charlotte Lagarde's The Ballad of Fred Hersch, an intimate portrait of one of today's foremost jazz pianists and composers and his extraordinary work. Unseen Films says it "operates with much the same logic as a jazz session, […] any audience can appreciate its simple honesty, bravery, and beauty."

Premiering tonight, Monday, Sept. 25 on HBO is Maxim Pozdorovkin's Clinica De Migrantes, a portrait of a volunteer-run health clinic in South Philadelphia that treats undocumented and uninsured immigrants. The film was nominated for Best Short at the 2016 IDA Documentary Awards.

Currently streaming at POV is 2004's Lost Boys of Sudan, which follows two young Sudanese refugees, Peter and Santino, through their first year in America. The San Francisco Chronicle called it Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk's film "spellbinding."