Recommended Viewing: HBO’s Sins of My Father & PBS’ A Letter to Elia

Tonite, you’ve got the choice of not one, but two documentary films making their television premieres.

After Venice, Telluride and NYFF premieres, PBS are wasting no time in releasing Martin Scorsese/Kent Jones documentary A Letter To Elia on American Masters [9:00-10:30 PM/ET].

Kazan the honoree was not always so reserved and retiring. Elia Kazan the director bravely and artfully confronted some of the more pressing social issues of his time: topics such as class division, bigotry and corruption. His courage and talent behind the camera delivered some of Hollywood’s most unforgettable cinematic achievements, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955). His leadership and tutelage elicited OSCAR®-Winning performances from screen greats such as Vivien Leigh, Anthony Quinn, Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint.

From the Sundance Film Festival, Nicolas Entel’s Sins of My Father [HBO 9pm ET/PT] interviews Sebastian Marroquin (formerly Juan Pablo Escobar) and his mother, Maria Victoria, and never-before-revealed home movies, photographs and audio recordings from the Escobar family archive. Marroquin, who changed his name and fled Colombia after his father was gunned down in 1993, grapples with the impossible task of reconciling the conflicting roles of his father: the doting family man he still loves, and the stone-hearted criminal who publicly threatened his enemies and their own families.