Award-winning filmmaker Varda Bar-Kar’s choir music documentary BIG VOICE will have an encore broadcast on PBS-KOCE SoCal at 7 pm (PST) on Thursday, July 12, 2018.
Bar-Kar, who produced and directed BIG VOICE, recently participated in Ryan Murphy’s Half Foundation television directing mentorship program on the hit FOX series 9-1-1. Having dedicated much of her career to independent filmmaking, Varda is excited to now be expanding into television directing.
PBS SoCal premiered BIG VOICE earlier in the summer. The broadcast garnered a Bronze Telly Award for TV Individual Documentary Programming. (The Telly Awards receives over 12,000 entries from all 50 states and 5 continents.)
Ratings for BIG VOICE exceeded PBS SoCal’s daypart average by 40%. The website landing page for the show was in the top 11 most visited on the PBS SoCal website March 1 to May 3, beating out national programs such as Antiques Roadshow, Independent Lens, and PBS Masterpiece. BIG VOICE clearly has universal appeal, receiving very broad carriage on PBS stations across the United States. In the first month after being released nationally, the program was scheduled over 1,100 times on 203 channels in 114 markets, reaching 80% of the top 25 markets across the country, and in 39 US states – covering 70% of the United States.
A feature-length version of Bar-Kar’s BIG VOICE (distributed by Gravitas Ventures) was honored with the “Best Documentary Feature Award” at both New Filmmakers Los Angeles and the Heartland Film Festival. The documentary feature can also be found on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
BIG VOICE is an award-winning feature documentary chronicling a year in the life of the demanding Santa Monica high school choir director pushing his students to achieve artistry and become one big voice despite the obstacles they face.
