The Third Coast International Audio Festival brings the best new documentaries produced worldwide to the national airwaves in a special two-hour program, Best of the Best: The 2013 Third Coast Festival Broadcast.

The featured documentaries, all winners of the 13th annual TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition, demonstrate just how powerful radio can be. Innovative and insightful, the stories will engage, provoke, entertain, and transport listeners, proving that all you need to discover new worlds is...a little box and an antenna. In addition to these memorable stories, Best of the Best includes interviews with winning producers Kenny Malone, Alicia Zuckerman, Tim Howard, Linda Lutton and Alex Kotlowitz who give us a glimpse into the art of audio storytelling.

Best of the Best may be presented in a number of ways, as a two hour program, or as two one-hour programs. Stations may also air just one hour.

On a fall day in 1981, Ricardo Ramirez accepted an offer to become a bishop in San Antonio, Texas.

At StoryCorps, he remembered the dozens of phone calls he made that day.

One of the first was to his grandmother Panchita Espitia.

As a young priest, Gil Gustafson sexually abused four boys in his parish. When he was confronted about his behavior, he confessed, was sentenced to 1.5 years in state prison, and embarked on a decades-long journey of recovery and reparation.

Nearby in the Twin Cities, when Susan Pavlak was in high school, she was sexually abused by her Catholic teacher, a former nun. Years later, when she finally saw her abuse for what it was, she embarked on her own path of healing and justice – including a face-to-face meeting with her abuser.

In 2006, Gustafson and Pavlak met at a conference on preventing sexual abuse. Pavlak spoke on a panel, and Gustafson introduced himself to her afterwards. They realized they were both interested in restorative justice. That encounter sparked an unlikely collaboration that continues to this day – between a perpetrator and survivor of clergy sex abuse who are at the forefront of bringing restorative justice to the Catholic Church.

Learn more about their story at the National Catholic Reporter (slightly outdated): https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/uncommon-conversation-sex-abuse-falls-silent

The piece is 1:02:43 long.

In 1995, Douglas A. Nadeau of Marblehead, Massachusetts underwent a pallidotomy at Mass. General Hospital, an operation designed to eradicate neurons in his brain that no longer responded to dopamine, the naturally-created chemical that facilitates movement. Nine years earlier, while on a business trip, Doug had been bitten by an insect and developed strange Parkinsonian symptoms, such as the inability to keep his eyes open while talking. These caused numerous problems for Doug, a high-powered corporate lawyer in Boston. Over time, the symptoms worsened until Doug lost his mobility at night and was reduced to a hospital bed. Following the procedure, in which Doug practically walked off the operating table, he found he was unable to inhibit certain antisocial tendencies that, prior to the surgery, he'd kept repressed. To make matters worse, his surgery turned out to be a failure, and his symptoms returned one by one. The next nine years tested the boundaries and limits of love, marriage, and tolerance, both within the family and in the Nadeaus' wide circle of friends and acquaintances.