In 1981, when the artist Maya Lin was just 21 and still an undergraduate at Yale, she won a national design competition: Lin was chosen to create a Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. She envisioned a long, low, two-part black granite wall that wedged into the land in a wide open V-shape, one arm pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial, the other toward the Washington Monument. Carved into the vertical granite surface would be the names of 57,939 fallen soldiers. “I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up,” Lin said. “And with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal.” But her selection ignited controversy. She was Asian, she was young, and the design was minimalist and unconventional. In 1994, Freida Lee Mock’s film about the backlash and Lin’s quiet defiance won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The film now comes to PBS. —Elena Clavarino