The Transformation | American Documentary

The Transformation

POV Season 9

Feature Film
1996

Ricardo was once Sara, a homeless HIV positive transvestite, living in the underbelly of Manhattan. Today he is a churchgoing, married man, saved by a Dallas ministry. He has renounced his homosexuality, but is his conversion complete? Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio offer an intimate look at Ricardo's transformation.

The Transformation

Feature Film
1996

Ricardo was once Sara, a homeless HIV positive transvestite, living in the underbelly of Manhattan. Today he is a churchgoing, married man, saved by a Dallas ministry. He has renounced his homosexuality, but is his conversion complete? Susana Aiken and ...

93Queen

Feature Film
2018

Interview

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, 93Queen follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are smashing the patriarchy in their community by creating the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps in New York City. With unprecedented and ...

Still Tomorrow

Feature Film
2018

Interview

A village woman with no high school diploma becomes China's most famous poet, and her book of poetry the best-selling such volume in China in the past 20 years. Still Tomorrow follows Yu Xiuhua, a 39-year-old woman living with cerebral ...

The War to Be Her

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

In Waziristan, "one of the most dangerous places on earth", Maria Toorpakai defies the Taliban, disguising herself as a boy so she can play sports freely. But when she becomes a rising star, her true identity is revealed and death ...

Memories of a Penitent Heart

Feature Film
2017

Feature Film

Filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo suspected that there was something ugly in her family's past. Memories of a Penitent Heart excavates a buried conflict around her uncle Miguel, who died at a time when AIDS was synonymous with sin. As she searches ...

What Tomorrow Brings

Feature Film
2016

Feature Film

What Tomorrow Brings goes inside the very first girls' school in a small Afghan village. Never before have fathers here allowed their daughters to be educated; now Taliban threats heighten their misgivings. From the school's beginnings in 2009 to ...

Pink Boy

Short Film
2016

Short Film

An intimate portrait of a gender-nonconforming child growing up in conservative rural Florida.

StoryCorps Shorts: The Saint of Dry Creek

Short Film
2015

Short Film

Patrick Haggerty grew up the son of a dairy farmer in rural Dry Creek, Washington, during the 1950s. As a teenager, Pat began to understand he was gay — something he thought he was hiding well. But one day, after ...

StoryCorps Shorts: A Good Man

Short Film
2014

Short Film

Bryan Wilmoth and his seven younger siblings were raised in a strict, religious home. In this StoryCorps Animated Short, he talks to his brother Mike about reconnecting years after their dad kicked Bryan out for being gay. Major funding provided ...

Flawed

Short Film
2011

Short Film

Artist/filmmaker Andrea Dorfman's drawings burst colorfully into life as she animates the story of her long-distance relationship with a man whose profession — plastic surgery — gives her plenty of fodder.

34x25x36

Short Film
2009

Short Film

34 x 25 x 36 is Jesse Epstein's third installment in a trilogy of films (along with The Guarantee and the Sundance award-winning Wet Dreams and False Images) examining issues of body image from quirky and revealing angles. This ...

Reluctantly Queer

Short Film
2020

Short Film

A young gay man from Ghana struggles to reconcile his sexuality and love for his mother through a series of letters in this deceptively simple yet powerful piece.

Muxes

Short Film
2020

Short Film

In the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, Mexico, the world is not divided simply into men and women. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes”—men who consider themselves women ...

Gentlemen of Vision

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

Gentlemen of Vision follows a year in the life of coach, counselor and founder Marlon Wharton, and his 2015-2016 class of young Black males as he strives to rewrite future prospects for his students. While striving for excellence in school ...

100 Years

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

100 Years: One Woman's Fight for Justice is the compelling story of Elouise Cobell, a petite Blackfeet warrior from Montana, the great granddaughter of the legendary, Mountain Chief. As an advocate for Native American financial self-determination and independence, she conducted ...

Finding Kukan

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

Filmmaker Robin Lung documents her 7-year journey to uncover the efforts of Li Ling-Ai, the visionary but uncredited producer of Kukan. Lung discovers a damaged film print of Kukan, and pieces together the untold tale of the two renegades behind ...

Who is Arthur Chu?

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

Who is Arthur Chu? follows 11-time Jeopardy! winner Arthur Chu, who won almost $300,000. By using an unconventional game strategy, the former insurance analyst amassed tens of thousands of fans and haters on Twitter. In an effort to put ...

Personal Statement

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

Personal Statement follows three Brooklyn high school seniors intent on defying the odds for themselves and their classmates: getting their peers into college. Becoming the very resource they don't have for themselves as peer college counselors, the students star in ...

Snapchat Films

Interactive
2016

In 2016, POV produced the first independent films ever for Snapchat Discover, distributed in partnership with the short-form digital content creator NowThis. In Lizzie Jacobs' We'll Still Be Here, dominoes players keep their beloved game alive while a neighborhood changes ...

Hooligan Sparrow

Feature Film
2016

Feature Film

The danger is palpable as intrepid young filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows maverick activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues to southern China to seek justice in the case of six elementary school girls allegedly sexually abused ...

From This Day Forward

Feature Film
2016

Feature Film

From This Day Forward is a moving portrayal of an American family coping with one of life's most intimate transformations. When director Sharon Shattuck's father came out as transgender and began living as Trisha, Sharon was in the awkward throes ...

Cutie and the Boxer

Feature Film
2015

Feature Film

The Academy Award®-nominated Cutie and the Boxer is a moving account of the chaotic and unconventional 40-year love affair and creative partnership between action painter Ushio Shinohara and his wife, Noriko, also an artist. Ushio, who punches canvases with ...

The Storm Makers

Feature Film
2015

Feature Film

Featuring brutally candid testimony, The Storm Makers is a chilling exposÃ© of Cambodia's human trafficking underworld and an eye-opening look at the complex cycle of poverty, despair and greed that fuels this brutal modern slave trade. More than half ...

Point and Shoot

Feature Film
2015

Feature Film

Two-time Oscar® nominee Marshall Curry celebrates his 10th anniversary with POV with the amazing tale of Matt VanDyke. A timid 26-year-old with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matt left home in Baltimore in 2006 for what he called a "crash course in manhood ...

Scaredycat

Short Film
2007

An experimental documentary about the role fear plays in our lives, Scaredycat takes as a point of departure the beating of the filmmaker at the hands of a gang of young men who called themselves "The Portland Riders."

She Shorts (1998)

Short Film
1998

A selection of hypnotically engaging short films by and about women that delve into the elation, passion and pain of contemporary female experience. From a vivacious celebration of coming of age in Elizabeth Schub's Cuba 15, to darkly drawn ...

She Shorts: Repetition Compulsion

Short Film
1998

A selection of hypnotically engaging short films by and about women that delve into the elation, passion and pain of contemporary female experience. From a vivacious celebration of coming of age in Elizabeth Schub's Cuba 15, to darkly drawn ...

She Shorts: Two or Three Things But Nothing For Sure

Short Film
1998

A selection of hypnotically engaging short films by and about women that delve into the elation, passion and pain of contemporary female experience. From a vivacious celebration of coming of age in Elizabeth Schub's Cuba 15, to darkly drawn ...

She Shorts: Cuba 15

Short Film
1998

A selection of hypnotically engaging short films by and about women that delve into the elation, passion and pain of contemporary female experience. From a vivacious celebration of coming of age in Elizabeth Schub's Cuba 15, to darkly drawn ...

Moroni For President

Feature Film
2018

Trailer

Every four years, the Navajo Nation elects its president, whom many consider the most powerful Native American in the country. Frustrated about the lack of progress in the reservation, Moroni Benally, a witty academic LGBTQ candidate with radical ideas, hopes ...

Vegas Baby

Feature Film
2017

Trailer

The Sher Institute in Las Vegas is holding a contest. First prize: a free round of in vitro fertilization – but even for the winners, there’s no guarantee of success. News & Documentary Emmy® nominated Vegas Baby follows the journeys ...

Good Luck Soup

Feature Film
2017

Trailer

For filmmaker Matthew Hashiguchi, growing up half Japanese/half Italian in a white Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, was a difficult experience. In Good Luck Soup, Hashiguchi sets out on a journey to discover how the rest of his multi-racial ...

Adama

Feature Film
2016

Trailer

In March 2005, an FBI document leaked to the press mysteriously identified Adama Bah, a 16-year-old teenager from Harlem, NY, as an “imminent threat to the security of the United States.” Adama provides a timely perspective on the experience of ...

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez

Feature Film
2016

Trailer

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez is a portrait of the artist, revealing Sanchez’s uncompromising life. Deemed "a lion in literature's forest" by poet Maya Angelou, Sanchez is a winner of major literary honors, including the American Book Award in 1985 and ...

Film Credits

Carlos Aparicio
Susana Aiken

Press Room

‘POV’ Captures the Revolutionary Campaign for Workers’ Rights at Amazon in its 38th Season Opener UNION La 38ª temporada de POV presenta historias humanas francas sobre la identidad, la familia y la esperanza colectiva La temporada comienza el lunes, 23 de junio de 2025 POV’s 38th Season Presents Honest, Human Stories of Identity, Kinship and Collective Hope Season Begins Monday, June 23, 2025

More from The Press Room

Broadcast schedule

Check your local PBS station
for upcoming airings of POV

More from this series

Learn more about POV