What generalizations can be gathered from PBS’s summer documentary program, P.O.V., in its 16th season, airing on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on WGBH 44 beginning June 24? That the pristine days of 16mm celluloid filmmaking are over: the six films that I watched are fast-and-cheap digital shoots, with the focus on content over form. The messages are liberal ones: pro–Bill of Rights, pro-sexual-choice, pro-multicultural America. Our documentarians continue to be earnest left-of-center types. The stories? Many of the docs tell of people who have emigrated from elsewhere struggling to have both an American and an indigenous self.

Considering the variety of documentaries produced, probably too many films on this year’s schedule offer versions of the same immigrant tale. But my quibble is minor. I actually liked every P.O.V. documentary from the 2003 season.

Flag Wars (June 24). Filmmakers Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras put their noses into an impossible situation, where fulfilling the American Dream for one oppressed group means deepening the oppression of another. In Columbus, Ohio, the gentrification of a neighborhood by Yuppie gays causes the displacement of poor black families who have resided in this deteriorating part of town for decades. The camera bounces among hetero blacks and homosexual whites of Old Towne East, and there’s no reconciliation between the parties. The film’s point of view must be surmised since, fortunately, there’s no didactic voice-over. If there’s an Enemy, it’s the vulture-like real-estate agents (in this case, they’re lesbian), who get indignant when some people of color defiantly refuse to sell their homes.

Georgie Girl (June 24, 10:30). A Maori native, George Beyer was a pre-op stripper, hooker, and drug addict. Post-op, the openly transsexual "Georgie" Beyer, a TV actress and diva singer, was voted mayor of her white rural town and then elected in 1999 to New Zealand’s parliament. The film by Annie Goldson and Peter Wells is a wholly partisan pro-Georgie portrait, and indeed, MP Beyer is endearing and charismatic, a hard-working populist politician.

Larry Vs. Lockney (July 8). Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck’s documentary may be the best in the series — as ferocious an exposé of American herd mentality as the late works of Mark Twain. It’s the story of how one gutsy guy in Lockney, Texas, an ultraconservative farm town of 2000, dared to say "No" when the school board voted mandatory drug testing for all students. Larry Tannahill, a meek, humble, Ron Howard type, refused to allow his son Brady to be tested, which brought in the ACLU to champion a Fourth Amendment challenge. The most chilling scene: the school-board meeting becomes a pep rally attended by every soul in the Last Picture Show–like town, all of them (led by the Christian athletes) standing up proudly for drug testing, all scapegoating Larry for daring a divergent opinion.

Discovering Dominga (July 15). A Guatemalan woman brought to the US as a child has recovered memories of horrors back home. Her trips to the Mayan country in the Guatemalan mountains lead her back to the early 1980s, when the country’s military, with American military aid, slaughtered several hundred thousand natives. Among the innocent dead: Dominga’s mother and father. Directed by Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo McConahay, this is a harrowing, important documentary, if only for its recovered memory of Reagan’s murderous foreign policy.

The Flute Player (July 22).The MFA has shown this poignant work by local filmmaker Jocelyn Glatzer in which Arn Chorn-Pond, a Cambodian youth worker in Lowell, returns to the former Killing Fields, where he was an adolescent prisoner for four years under the holocaust-minded Khmer Rouge. Forced to undress those about to be murdered, Arn has since been plagued by guilt that he survived by doing monstrous things. He tries to find solace by locating great musicians who had thrived before the Khmer Rouge. The happy ending: Arn has newly recorded their music, preserving for the world traditional Cambodian sounds.

90 Miles (July 29). This is a first-person narrative of the filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldivar, who, as a rabid young Communist, reluctantly agreed to emigrate with his family from Cuba in 1980, becoming Mariel "boat people." Two decades later, he’s living in New York and openly gay, and his family has long settled among the conservative Cubans of Miami. The American Dream? His father suffers depression, a middle-aged man toiling in a low-paid job selling shoes. Zaldivar films himself going back to Cuba. The trip is engaging, the people are fun, but the movie could have picked up a notch if, once home, he would have declared his gayness.