Keiko Tsuno

Open Space was a programme produced by the BBC's Community Programme Unit. It was an evolution of the earlier Open Door series of programmes allowing minority points of view to make a television programme about issues of concern to them. The programmes were transmitted on BBC 2 in a mid-evening slot and would attract audiences between 500,000 and 1,500,000. In a typical year there would be two or three groups of up to eight Open Space programmes each usually half an hour long. A producer, an assistant and a budget of up to £25,000 would be allocated to each programme.

This revealing portrait of Cuba follows the lives of Fidel Castro and three Cuban families affected by his policies over the last four decades.

The stories of six "ordinary" people who live or work along New York City's Third Avenue, which runs for sixteen miles through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, cutting through the complex social strata of the city to reveal wildly different economic and ethnic subcultures.

"Healthcare: Your Money or Your Life" (1977) is a DCTV investigative documentary examining the impact of budget cuts and resource shortages on a Brooklyn public hospital. Contrasting Kings County Hospital with the better-funded Downstate Medical Center across the street, the film exposes structural inequalities in the American healthcare system.

Produced by DCTV in response to what its makers saw as distorted media portrayals of New York City’s Chinatown, "Chinatown: Immigrants in America" (1976) offers an unvarnished portrait of an immigrant community confronting poverty, labor exploitation, and cultural displacement. Directed by Jon Alpert and Yoko Maruyama, the film documents restaurant, garment, and service workers enduring low wages and unsafe conditions while struggling to build lives in America.

An insider's tour of this bustling street, where immigrants are caught between the forces of the law and a street with a law of its own.

Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno made headlines with a 1977 journalistic coup when they became the first American television crew allowed back into Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal and were given unprecedented access to the ruined countryside and its people. The resulting "up-close" study of Vietnam's grim post war reality relies on the voices of the common people to tell their stories.

As the first American television crew allowed into Cuba since the 1959 revolution, filmmakers Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno travel across the island documenting daily life under Fidel Castro. Through interviews with farmers, workers, and families, the film offers a rare ground-level portrait of Cuban society fifteen years after the revolution.