Down a Dark Stairwell

Reporter Clay Pigeon interviews New Yorkers in October, 2008.

Filmmaker Tadashi explores his father Robert A. Nakamura's life as an influential Asian American artist and activist, while grappling with Robert's Parkinson's diagnosis, navigating themes of art, grief, and their father-son relationship.

Filmmaker Nadine Natour turns her lens on her parents and her hometown, Appomattox, VA, to capture the story of her parents' emigration from Palestine to the United States. An uplifting, layered and often funny portrait of Palestinian Muslim immigrants Gehad and Sabah Natour, as the success of their popular grocery store defies xenophobia in the conservative rural town where the Civil War ended.

Jeanette Lee was like nothing else billiards had ever seen - and when she took the game by storm, she became, improbably, one of the most recognizable figures in all of sports.

Mark Jones, a former West Point cadet struggling with PTSD and alcoholism, got life in prison in Florida after an attempted carjacking under Florida’s “two-strikes” law. Such statutes result in mandatory maximum sentences, including life in prison, for crimes in which no one is injured. Florida’s is among the strictest, but many states have similar laws that increase prison time for repeat offenses.