In the wake of slashes in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public media stations nationwide are bracing for impact. But one program manager at GBH, Emily Abi-Kheirs, is betting that the local stories worth telling aren’t disappearing anytime soon. 

Kickstarted in the fall of 2024, Local Lens is a curated documentary series spotlighting local filmmakers and documentarians around New England. Abi-Kheirs is one of the forces behind the initiative, and puts her vision plainly:

“The idea for Local Lens is that films from and by the New England community — GBH could be a home for those stories.”

And every Thursday at 9 p.m. EST, it is. Most of GBH’s schedule comes pre-cut from PBS — Local Lens lives in the gaps.

Since its launch just two years ago, the series has served as a door into broadcast for homegrown films about everything from a farming program inside a Maine state prison to four women recovering from addiction in Worcester—stories that, according to Abi-Kheirs, “exist beyond the headlines.” 

We sat down to talk about how she finds the films she’s looking for and why she thinks public media can be a meaningful stop in a documentary’s life. 

How does Local Lens fit into GBH’s programming?

“We have opportunities outside of what they call common carriage to program things that we buy from other distributors — and that’s kind of where Local Lens falls into the picture. We’re working with local filmmakers to shine a spotlight on New England content, New England films, ideally created by New England filmmakers themselves.”

What makes a film a good fit for Local Lens?

“It goes down to what a high-quality film is. Is there good craft? Just the basics — is there great production quality, whether it’s the cameras, the way a film is shot, everything from the cinematography to the sound to the editing, to the actual storytelling itself. We’re still looking for quality of craft at the end of the day…”

Beyond craft, Abi-Kheirs says, the rule is geographic:

“It’s really just that the content is curated around our region… ideally created by New England filmmakers themselves, although that’s not a hard and fast rule.” 

And just this fall, in Local Lens’ second season, the team launched an open-submission portal on the GBH site, giving regional filmmakers and local creatives something public media has rarely offered them before: a way in. 

How do filmmakers actually find you — and how do you find them?

“We have a rolling submission process — this is also new, just this last fall. We put together the submission portal, and so we’re looking at films sort of all year round…”

Filmmakers submit completed work through the portal on a rolling basis — the small team of five curators receives roughly two films per week. But given Abi-Kheirs’ background in the New England film festival circuit as Program Director of Salem Film Fest, Massachusetts’ largest international documentary film festival, the search doesn’t end there. She emphasizes meeting creatives where they actually are.

“…we make a really big effort to reach out to the filmmaking community here in Boston, where filmmakers gather and just show up in those places. Really just trying to be part of the community that we’re hoping to serve.”

But in an age when broadcast TV audiences are rapidly dwindling, getting a film on air is only half the battle. Keeping it accessible is the other. 

How has Local Lens expanded beyond broadcast?

“As audiences shift away from television — and we’ve been seeing that across public media, it’s not just a GBH thing but really an industry-wide thing — we have been asking for expanded rights. We realized that if we’re just getting membership Video on Demand (VOD) rights, it’s just a very small audience. So, we started asking for free VOD rights, and that basically made films available in the PBS app, which can be streamed really anywhere in the US. Then we took it a step further and started asking for YouTube rights.”

The shift has been tangible. Love, Chinatown, an 18-minute documentary spotlighting two generations of Boston Chinatown residents, has amassed over 63,000 views on GBH’s YouTube channel since its premiere there last fall, and won the Audience Award at the 2025 Boston Asian American Film Festival. 

The push beyond broadcast into streaming transformed Local Lens from a Thursday night slot to a three-tiered pipeline: broadcast, PBS app, YouTube. 

Are any other stations building something similar to Local Lens?

“There are other stations that are doing really great work highlighting local films — Maine Public, KQED out in California, KPBS in San Diego. There’s also a series called Real South that started as a regional effort and grew into a nationally distributed series through PBS. Everyone’s doing it a little differently — dependent on the resources they have at their stations.”

Abi-Kheirs sits on the board of the Public Television Programmers Association, where one of her major efforts has been to teach programs across the country how they can connect with their own independent filmmaking communities and create models of their own.

“Everyone needs to be sharing their knowledge right now across the country,” she said.

“Documentaries are just a wonderful thing that we have in this world, beyond the headlines of things to provide nuance and connection and empathy.”

In a media landscape that moves a million miles a minute, Local Lens is asking you to sit down, slow down, and feel something.

How very New England of them.