‘POV’ Reintroduces An Artist’s Journey From Student to Inspiring Millions of Americans in Freida Lee Mock’s Academy Award®-winning film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision
Overview
Brooklyn, N.Y. – June 24, 2025 – POV, the multi-Emmy® and Peabody award-winning documentary series, explores the journey of the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Civil Rights Memorial, and other major public art in director Freida Lee Mock’s Academy Award®-winning film, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. The documentary, produced by Mock and Terry Sanders, tells the story of Lin’s vision and character, whose impact resonates deeply with the millions who have touched and been touched by her work.
Executive produced by Eileen Harris Norton and co-presented with CAAM (Center for Asian American Media), Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision will make its encore presentation on POV Tuesday, July 22, 2025 at 10pm (check local listings) on PBS Television. It will then be available to stream until October 20, 2025 at pbs.org, and the PBS App. Now in its 38th season, POV continues to mark its place as America’s longest-running non-fiction series.
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision tells the gripping drama behind the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the story of a young woman and the power of art to provoke important conversations surrounding issues of national memory, mourning, service, and sacrifice. Freida Lee Mock shows how an unknown architecture student was able to create, against great odds and intense political opposition, stunning memorials with a profound impact on the American people. Lin’s memorials are described as “...places of pilgrimage, where merely to touch seems to heal long broken hearts, reconciling armies of veterans, assuaging historic wounds of activists…she has rendered stones into compelling American shrines.”
Using Maya Lin’s first-person account, the film explains the creative and political process by which she conceived and developed these monumental projects over a decade of work. Maya Lin became a prominent designer at the age of 21 by winning the largest design competition in American history to construct the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, now considered to be one of the greatest cultural achievements of the 20th century. Exploring art, politics, and censorship in the creative process, the film poses questions about the intersection of art and politics, as well as artistic freedom in the face of public pressure.
“POV’s encore presentation of Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision is the perfect platform for a new generation of public television viewers to discover the extraordinary work of the global artist Maya Lin,” said director Freida Lee Mock. “For those who saw her in her 20s when the film premiered on PBS thirty years ago, this encore broadcast confirms that they witnessed the creative foundations of an artist of singular vision. I’m very excited for viewers to experience Maya Lin’s impact and story.”
“Maya Lin reimagined what a memorial can look like with a minimalist approach that, somehow, captured all the pain and sacrifice of a generation,” said Chris White, Executive Producer, POV. “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision illustrates how art can push the needle towards change. We’re eager for a new generation of Americans to discover, after 30 years, how resonant this film remains.”
Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision premiered in Beverly Hills in 1994 and won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Feature Documentary Film at the 1995 Academy Awards® ceremony. It was also an official selection at the 1995 Chicago International Film Festival and the Hawaii International Film Festival.
Raves include:
"Ms. Lin emerges as an impressive figure, whether she is describing how her thoughts evolve or presiding authoritatively over works in progress."
- Janet Maslin, THE NEW YORK TIMES
"If you have been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, you will want to see it. If you have not, it will make you want to go."
- Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“...a powerful, inspiring account of a supremely talented woman’s professional transformation…” THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision is a production of Sanders & Mock Productions and the American Film Foundation. Freida Lee Mock is the director, producer, and writer. Terry Sanders is a producer; Don Lenzer, Eddie Marritz, and Bestor Cram are the directors of photography, and William T. Cartwright Sr. is the editor. Jessica Yu is the associate producer, and Charles Bernstein is the composer. Steve Flick and Weddington Productions, Inc. are the sound designers, and Rick Ash is the sound mixer. The executive producers are Eileen Harris Norton, and Erika Dilday, and Chris White for American Documentary.
Photos
Download Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision photos.
Click Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision Press Kit to access the festival press notes.
Credits
Director and Writer: Freida Lee Mock
Producer: Freida Lee Mock, Terry Sanders
Cast/Participants: Maya Lin, Bob Doubek, Jan Scruggs, Professor Vincent Scully, J. Carter Brown
Executive Producers: Eileen Harris Norton, Erika Dilday and Chris White for American Documentary
Directors of Photography: Don Lenzer, Eddie Marritz, Bestor Cram
Editor: William T. Cartwright Sr.
Associate Producer: Jessica Yu
Composer: Charles Bernstein
Writer: Freida Lee Mock
Sound Directors: Steve Flick, Weddington Productions, Inc.
Sound Mixer: Rick Ash
Language: English
Country: USA
Year: 1994
About the Filmmakers
Freida Lee Mock - Director, Producer, Writer,
Freida Lee Mock is an Academy Award® and Emmy Award®-winning filmmaker with a range of films on the arts and humanities that include: the Oscar® nominated films Rose Kennedy: A Life to Remember, Sing!, and To Live Or To Let Die; and the Emmy® Award winning Lillian Gish: An Actor’s Life For Me and The Kennedy Center Honors. Her work also features numerous biographical films of notables such as Justice Ruth Ginsburg, Jesuit Greg Boyle (G-Dog), Anita Hill, and Steven Spielberg for the Academy Awards®, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Elia Kazan, and others for the Kennedy Center Honors. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America, the International Documentary Association, the Writers Guild of America, and Center for Asian American Media.
Maya Lin, Protagonist, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision
Maya Lin is an American architect, designer and sculptor. Born in Athens, Ohio to Chinese immigrants, she achieved national recognition while still an undergraduate at Yale in 1981 when she won the largest design competition in U.S. history to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Designed in the minimalist architectural style, the Memorial initially attracted controversy but went on to become legendary and the most visited Memorial in Washington, DC. Maya Lin has since designed numerous memorials, public and private buildings, landscapes, and sculptures, catapulting her to global recognition after her first Memorial. Her second celebrated Memorial is the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Maya is also known for environmentally themed works, which often address environmental decline. She draws inspiration from the architecture of nature but believes that nothing she creates can match its beauty. She also draws inspiration from "culturally diverse sources, including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, and works by American earthworks artists of the 1960s and the 1970s.” Maya’s largest public art project is Confluence, six environmental sites along 450 miles of the Columbia River in southern Washington state that honors the interaction of Native American tribes with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804.
Terry Sanders, Producer,
Director, producer, writer Terry Sanders is a two-time Oscar® winner who has produced and/or directed more than 80 award-winning dramatic features, theatrical documentaries, television specials, and a large body of portrait films of major American artists, writers and musicians. He produced, wrote and directed the feature documentary, Fighting For Life, about military doctors and nurses on the front lines to save lives and the wounded in field hospitals that begins when battles end and recently wrote , produced and directed Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey, a coming -of-age dramatic feature which starred and introduced Academy Award®-winning actress Mikey Madison in the title role and the documentary 9th Circuit Cowboy, the Long Good Fight of Judge Harry Pregerson.
About
About POV
Produced by American Documentary, POV is the longest-running independent documentary showcase on American television. Since 1988, POV has presented films on PBS that capture the full spectrum of the human experience, with a long commitment to centering women and people of color in front of, and behind, the camera. The series is known for introducing generations of viewers to groundbreaking works like Tongues Untied (1989), Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1992), Rabbit in the Room (1999), Of Civil Wrongs & Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story (2001), Made in L.A. (2007), American Promise (2013), Not Going Quietly (2021), While We Watched (2022), A House Made of Splinters (2022), The Last Out (2023) and the mini-series And She Could be Next (2020). Throughout its history POV has featured the work of award-winning, innovative filmmakers including Jonathan Demme, Laura Poitras, Nanfu Wang, Frederick Wiseman, Emiko Omori, Janus Metz Pedersen and Ava DuVernay. In 2018, POV Shorts launched as one of the first PBS series dedicated to bold and timely short-form documentaries. In 2024, Indiewire named seven POV films in its roundup of “The 50 Best Documentaries of the 21st Century”: Faya Dayi (2021), The Mole Agent (2020), Minding The Gap (2018), Cameraperson (2016), The Look of Silence (2015), The Act of Killing (2013) and After Tiller (2013). All POV programs are available for streaming concurrent with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS App, available on iOS, Android, Roku streaming devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO. For more information about PBS Passport, visit the PBS Passport FAQ website.
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American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc) is a multimedia organization dedicated to creating, identifying and presenting contemporary stories that express opinions and perspectives rarely featured in mainstream media outlets. AmDoc is a catalyst for public culture, developing collaborative strategic engagement activities around socially relevant content on television, online and in community settings. These activities are designed to trigger action, from dialogue and feedback to educational opportunities and community participation.
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