film

Starting on September 2, the Peace Corps documentary, A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps will be available on PBS stations across the country. But there are still some regions that will need to request that their local stations air the documentary.

A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps is coming to PBS stations nationwide, starting September 2. You can help make sure this documentary airs in your region. With local PBS stations scheduling programming 2-3 months from air date, the time is now to reach out to your local station.

The PBS World channel will host a nationwide broadcast premiere on Friday, September 29 at 8 p.m. Eastern with repeats on Saturday, September 30 at 3 a.m., 9 a.m., and 3 p.m. Eastern. Your local station program managers will be deciding whether to schedule the film and how often over the next three years. View a list of confirmed stations and air times so far.

That’s where you come in. Call your station today, and ask that A Towering Task, which is distributed by NETA, be included in the line-up. Then, help get the word out about the documentary. This is a great opportunity to educate a broad audience about the history of Peace Corps, its many successes, and the challenges the agency has faced since its founding in 1961. Find your local station here. Request a time slot. Plan to organize a viewing party. Enjoy the show!

Read more about A Towering Task 

A Towering Task Documentary Official Website

A Towering Task: Peace Corps in the American Conversation

Guidelines for RPCV Communities to Partner With Your Local Public Television Station

By Will Glasscock

There are more than 150 public television license holders that operate more than 350 stations, reaching 97 percent of the American people. You have a role in ensuring that your local station carries A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps and that the Peace Corps story resonates in your community. 

The first — and most important — thing you can do is contact your local station and ask that they air A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps.

• Their website will have a “contact” link where you can submit your request that they air A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps. 

• In addition to requesting that they broadcast A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps, make sure that you include a compelling reason for why it is important that this story is broadcasted. Consider including an anecdote about your service or talk about how Peace Corps service impacted your life.

• Ask your friends, family members, and other RPCVs in your community to reach out to the station, too. The more requests that your station receives, the more likely that they will respond. 

• If you aren’t sure which station you should contact, visit pbs.org. In the top right corner of your screen, you’ll find what station’s coverage area PBS believes you reside in. 

• If you still don’t know where to start, email Will Glasscock for additional assistance.

Local public television stations are always looking for opportunities to engage with community partners to bring the stories and discussion from the screen to in-person events. If you are part of a formal or informal group of RPCVs in your community, reach out to your station to suggest ways that you could partner to deepen the engagement around the film. Examples of events you could partner with your station on include (but aren’t limited to):

• A film screening followed by a panel discussion by RPCVs who have served in different eras of Peace Corps.

• A “TED Talk” style event where local RPCVs share brief stories about their service and experience. 

• In conjunction with the station’s public affairs or civic engagement programming, you could suggest interviews with local RPCVs. You could also assist the station in connecting with local diaspora communities to give that perspective as well, especially for communities that are currently in the headlines (Ukrainians, Ethiopians, Sudanese, and more). 

• Include small business owners from diaspora communities (for example, ethnic restaurants and food trucks, or visual and performance artists) to join RPCVs for a screening of the film. 

• A Peace Corps recruitment event staffed by local RPCVs and, possibly, your region’s Peace Corps Recruiter. 

Lastly, we will be collecting best practices for stations partnering with local RPCV communities. If you and your local station are working on an event or other unique partnership, please let us know by emailing Will Glasscock. 

A portrait of Judy Irola

By Jordana Comiter

“You can be creative, and you can be managerial and spirited,” Judy Irola said of her work as a cinematographer. Photo by Douglas Kirkland

Judy Irola made history as a producer, director, cinematographer, and educator—and only the third female member of the American Society of Cinematographers. Her first feature, “Northern Lights,” won the Camera d’Or prize at Cannes in 1979. At Sundance her film “An Ambush of Ghosts” won the Cinematography Award, Dramatic Competition. The Peace Corps took her to Niger in 1966. “We came home to a different world in 1968,” Irola recalled. “There were anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, Gloria Steinem had launched the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Black Panthers were actively engaged in civil rights issues.”

She was tenacious. Her career began in the San Francisco Bay Area with KQED-TV’s documentary film unit. She shot more than 50 features and documentaries. She later earned an endowed chair, teaching at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. She returned to Niger in 2008 to make the documentary “Niger 66: A Peace Corps Diary,” to introduce audiences to the 65 Volunteers who had served with her and the communities where they worked. 

From the tribute in Ms. magazine: “Some directors see cinematography as a technical rather than as an artistic job,” she said. “It’s an artistic job—any director of photography will tell you that. What’s important is my vision—how I look at the image. It’s an artistic rendering. Women can do it just as well [as men] or better.” 

Judith Carol Irola was born in 1943. She died in February at age 77 of complications from COVID-19. We mourn her passing and cherish the ways she illuminated the world.  

She was committed to justice and equality. And a Peace Corps Volunteer helped the world see her in a new way.

By Steven Boyd Saum

Photo of Ruth Ginsburg by Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

“Ruth obviously changed the country, but she did it by convincing people to agree with her, instead of destroying the people who disagreed with her.”

Those words were spoken two years ago by Daniel Stiepleman — nephew of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who died yesterday at age 87. 

Stiepleman helped the world understand Ginsburg in a deeply personal way: He is author of the screenplay for “On the Basis of Sex,” the biographical film released in 2018 that chronicled both her commitment to justice and gender equality and her marriage to attorney Martin Ginsburg, who died in 2010. 

“Ruth obviously changed the country, but she did it by convincing people to agree with her, instead of destroying the people who disagreed with her.”

It was at Martin Ginsburg’s funeral, hearing tributes to his uncle, that Stiepleman understood Marty and Ruth’s life together in a new way. It was also at the funeral that he learned about the one case the couple argued together: Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, a tax case in an appeals court in 1972. 

As the Washington Post summarized the case: “The petitioner, Charles E. Moritz, had been denied a deduction for expenses incurred in caring for his invalid mother — a denial based on the assumption that women, not men, would be their parents’ caregivers in old age.” Marty argued the tax side of things; Ruth argued the gender discrimination side. It was, as a character in the film put it, an “opening salvo in a new civil rights war.”

Stiepleman served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kiribati; it was there that he met fellow Volunteer Jessica Hawley, who worked in public health. And Stiepleman has spoken about how the couple looked to Marty and Ruth as a model for their marriage. Indeed, the associate justice officiated at their wedding in her robes and trademark lace collar. He taught school before embarking on his screenwriting career; she studied medicine and this summer became an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a relative that Stiepleman mostly knew in his youth through family holidays together — Thanksgiving and Passover. “People would be, like, ‘She changed the world!’ and I always found that really confusing,” he told the  Los Angeles Times. “I’d be, like, ‘Her? Are you sure? She’s so quiet!’”

A story often told is that a year after Marty’s funeral, Stiepleman proposed to Ruth the idea of writing a film about her. Her response? “If that’s how you want to spend your time.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg, 2009. Photo by Pete Souza

As for Ruth Bader Ginsburg convincing and not destroying: “I love the idea that we could reclaim that sentiment — that we could both try to persuade others and be open to persuasion ourselves,” Stieplemen has said. “As opposed to thinking we know all the answers and we have to destroy anyone who disagrees with us. That ideal is what Ruth reveres about the court and the Constitution.”

And as for discrimination, in a year in which we mark the centennial of the 19th amendment coming into law, it bears quoting from one of Ginsburg’s opinions for the Supreme Court. Let’s take a 1996 decision that required the Virginia Military Institute to admit women: “Through a century plus three decades and more … women did not count among voters composing ‘We the People’; not until 1920 did women gain a constitutional right to the franchise. And for a half century thereafter, it remained the prevailing doctrine that government, both federal and state, could withhold from women opportunities accorded men so long as any ‘basis in reason’ could be conceived for the discrimination.”

We honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s commitment to justice and equality. And we in the Peace Corps community share our deepest condolences for her family in this time of sorrow. 

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView magazine and director of strategic communications for National Peace Corps Association.