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Screen Time: Week of May 8

By Akiva Gottlieb


From 'Abortion: Stories Women Tell.' Courtesy of HBO.

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

Streaming on HBO Now and HBO Go is Tracy Droz Tragos's Abortion: Stories Women Tell. The film looks at its subject through the stories of women struggling with unplanned pregnancies, abortion providers and clinic staff and activists on both sides of this contentious debate. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com wrote: "Some stories are among the most resonant I've heard in a documentary this year."

Premiering Monday, May 8 on World Channel's Local, USA - and streaming through June 7 - it's James Q. Chan's Forever, Chinatown. The film tells the story of unknown, self-taught 81-year-old artist Frank Wong, who has spent the past four decades recreating his fading memories by building romantic, extraordinarily detailed miniature models of the San Francisco Chinatown rooms of his youth.

Filmstruck is currently streaming Jonas Mekas's 1969 film Walden, a compilation of diaries, notes and sketches by the godfather of American underground cinema (and founder of Anthology Film Archives). Slant Magazine writes: "It's not only a living document of what quotidian existence was like in the '60s for a Lithuanian refugee residing in Manhattan, it's an earnest homage to the elusive state of being—warts and all."