Directors Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb announced the theatrical and digital release plans for the feature documentary Butterfly in the Sky. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and went on to screen at dozens of festivals, winning fourteen awards in total.

For 26 seasons, Reading Rainbow met young viewers in their living rooms, whisking them away on far-off adventures into the boundless world of books. Inspiring and nostalgic, Butterfly in the Sky takes audiences behind the scenes of this beloved PBS children’s series and tells the story of its iconic host LeVar Burton, giving an inside look at the challenges he and the show’s creators faced in cultivating a love of reading through television. Reliving the show’s legacy is a refreshing return to the written page. But you don’t have to take our word for it.

“Thomason and Whitcomb are terrific storytellers,” said LeVar Burton. “To take a look at Reading Rainbow through their lens and share this story with audiences everywhere is very special. I hope audiences walk away with the same warm, fuzzy feeling I did when I watched this documentary for the first time.”
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A Thousand Pines, a co-production with ITVS and Latino Public Broadcasting, is a vérité documentary that depicts the day-to-day lives of migrant workers laboring in America’s lucrative timber industry.

Following acclaimed screenings at numerous film festivals, including New York Latino, Workers Unite, Indie Memphis, DocsMX, Morelia, Green Film Festival of San Francisco, Hot Springs Documentary, and Buffalo International—where it won the Best Documentary Award, this insightful documentary continues its successful film festival run.

Additional in-person screenings are scheduled during February and March at the Alameda, Ocean City, San Diego Latino, and Houston Latino Film Festivals before its broadcast premiere on April 1, 2024, on PBS’s acclaimed series Independent Lens.

Directed by Noam Osband and Sebastián Díaz, A Thousand Pines is set in the beautiful and sometimes unforgiving landscape of the United States’ national forests. The first documentary to tell the story of workers in the US timber industry follows Raymundo Morales, the foreman of a crew of migrant workers from Oaxaca, Mexico, who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program. Filmed over the course of a year, between their hometown and the US, they must make the decision every year if they will leave their families in rural Mexico, or if they will return for another eight-month season of planting commercial pine forests.

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