Documentary

The Public Broadcasting Service recently presented a two-hour documentary on the War of 1812, the so-called "forgotten war. " Well, they forgot to include the Battle of North Point, one of the few land battles the Americans won against the British. While the show went into great detail describing American failures under inept generals, it ignored Gen. Sam Smith and the few Army regulars, militiamen and ordinary citizens under his command who prevented the British from capturing Baltimore and laying siege to Fort McHenry from the land side.

"The Maryland Harvest," a new documentary exploring the partnership between Maryland farmers and chefs, debuts Tuesday night at 9 p.m. on Maryland Public Television. You can watch a teaser for the documentary here . Produced by Hoopla, Inc. and hosted by Al Spoler, "The Maryland Harvest" follows the seasons as it chronicles several chef-farmer partnerships. Among the chefs are Spike Gjerde (Woodberry Kitchen), Cindy Wolf (Charleston) and David McCallum (Tilghman Island Inn)

The making of the Oscar-nominated movie "Music by Prudence" is a tale of two schools, one in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and one in Baltimore. A favorite for best short documentary at tonight's Academy Awards, this 33-minute flight presents an affecting portrait of its tough, gifted title character, the singer-songwriter in a band of disabled youths at the King George VI School & Centre for Children With Physical Disabilities in Bulawayo. Prudence Mabhena suffers from arthrogryposis, a condition that deforms joints and cost her both her legs.

At the start of his new MTV series, "Savage U," Dan Savage introduces himself to a group of University of Maryland students as a "big jerk" and a sex advice columnist. While there's not much "big jerk" behavior, there is lots of sound advice from the star of this winning production that launches with an episode filmed in College Park. "Savage U," which brings the columnist and his producer, Lauren Hutchinson, to a different college campus each week for frank discussions with students about sex, will also likely stir some culture-war controversy when it debuts at 11 p.m. Tuesday.

John Ehrlichman was in London recently to talk about a new three-hour television documentary on Richard Nixon's life done by WGBH-TV in Boston.He says he does not, quoting from his former boss, "wallow in Watergate."But 13 years after leaving prison for his Watergate crimes, Mr. Nixon's one-time chief domestic policy adviser, has not escaped Watergate's shadow, and he also hasn't shied away from it.So, when the ghosts of Watergate were summoned in the documentary, Mr. Ehrlichman, 65, agreed to go to London to discuss it.

Documentaries are the most exciting conversation-starters in contemporary American movies — and when they earn Academy Awards, their influence soars into the stratosphere. Winners like "Taxi to the Dark Side" and "The Cove" have shaped international discussions about human and animal rights. No wonder the Maryland Film Festival gala on March 11 will debate the question: "Are documentary filmmakers the new journalists?" Documentaries give the Academy a needed dose of gravitas.

The 1968 football game between Baltimore's Morgan State and what was then Louisiana's Grambling College was a good one - a nail-biter that went down to the wire. But the history and sociology of the event are what truly matter. And hats off to CBS Sports for committing the resources to telling that story with so much sensitivity and cultural context in a documentary, "1st & Goal in the Bronx: Grambling vs. Morgan State, 1968," premiering 7 p.m. Wednesday on the CBS Sports Network.

Television has long played a key role in helping us understand, appreciate and celebrate holidays. Think "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or viewing the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in your livingroom. Monday, HBO premieres a new documentary from Alexandra Pelosi, "Citizen U.S.A.: A 50 State Road Trip. " And I promise that if you give this modest little film an hour of your time, you will feel renewed, uplifted and possibly even inspired about being an American despite the troubled times in which we live.

Maryland Film Festival director Jed Dietz needed a smart, distinctive newsperson to host his annual fundraiser's centerpiece attraction. Who could be authoritative and engaging when asking a panel of Oscar-nominated directors, "Are documentary filmmakers the new journalists?" His top pick was always Meredith Vieira, co-host of "The Today Show" and the host of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. " Viera said Thursday, "I told him it's a little off-point for me because I'm doing a morning show now. I can't speak to what the landscape is like for documentaries at the networks.

The second installment of the Cinema Sunday Series at the Charles will commence at 10 a.m. Sunday. This series features an advance look at an unreleased film, which will be introduced and then discussed afterward by a local critic or artist.Sunday's film is a documentary well-received on the film festival circuit that just may have something to do with middle-Americans being raised by nannies.As an added attraction, John Jollis, a clerk at Video Americain, will show his short film "Your Montana Vacation Tour of the World's Wonders Begin With This Coupon" and answer questions afterward.

With "fracking" once again in the news, Maryland Public Television is airing a timely examination of the controversy around the controversial method for extracting natural gas. At 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday (3/21), MPT broadcasts " Fracking: Weighing the Risks ," looking at the pros and cons of drilling for gas in Marcellus shale deposits in Appalachia.  The 40-minute documentary portrays the divisions within western Maryland, where some farmers yearn for royalties from gas wells to help them stay on the land while others fear that drilling could destroy their water supply, their property and their health.

It's not often in judging the biography of a great artist that you can just pick up the phone and call one of the people who knew him best - and remains a principal keeper of the historical flame. But that is exactly the case with Cab Calloway, the Baltimore-raised jazz bandleader, singer and actor who is profiled in TV's "American Masters" series at 10 p.m. Monday on PBS. Camay Calloway Murphy, the performer's daughter, lives here and is happy to talk about her late father and how she feels he is treated in "American Masters Cab Calloway: Sketches.

Duty, service and honor are big words. They are also ones that are often abused these days by Washington politicians who thank each other for their "service" even as they sink deeper into partisan gridlock. "Game of Honor," a documentary about West Point and Annapolis and the Army-Navy football game played Dec. 10 in Landover, reminds viewers of the higher meanings of those words. The two-hour film premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday on Showtime. Producers Pete Radovich and Steve Karasik say they didn't set out with any such lofty goal in mind for their Showtime-CBS Sports co-production, which was shot during the past eight months in the barracks and on the playing fields at the U.S. military and naval academies.

Early in Laurence Fishburne's narration for the documentary "Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone," it is posited that the band could have come together only in Los Angeles, not least because when they first united in the early 1980s, the then-teenage members were mostly being bused to school from South Central to the San Fernando Valley. But the band also captured that essential, indescribable mix of styles and ideas that is the city's cultural hallmark. With its frantic blend of ska, punk, funk, soul and rock, Fishbone made music that was like the greatest party mix ever, and its frenetic live shows were all the more remarkable for the level of musicianship achieved even with all the jumping about.

A screening of the documentary film, "Forks Over Knives" is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 19 at the Norrisville Seventh-day Adventist Church, at 2 p.m. "Forks Over Knives" takes a look at the epidemic the world faces with degenerative diseases - coronary heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and strokes. It presents the case that these diseases are practically non-existent in societies where the people eat mostly a plant-based, whole foods-type diet. The film goes on to show that these degenerative diseases can be prevented and even reversed by not eating animal-based and processed foods.

When Kevin Clash was a boy in Baltimore County, he'd watch TV mere inches from the screen and wish he could walk right into "Sesame Street. " It didn't take him long to get there. At 15, the kid from Turners Station became the regular puppeteer on a WMAR kids show. At 19, he performed as Cookie Monster in the Sesame Street float at the 1979 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and that night met his hero, Muppet creator Jim Henson. "Sesame Street" hired Clash in his early 20s. Before he turned 25, he took a gravel-throated red fur-ball and imbued him with a loving nature, a piping voice and a rapscallion innocence.

A worn, wooden cattle car floats gently across the skyline, past the clean, white stone of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Guided by a crane, it finally comes to rest on a floor of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Columbia resident and Emmy award-winning producer Jeffrey Bieber chose this as the opening image for his documentary on the museum's creation, "For the Living."The boxcar, thought to have carried Jews to the Treblinka concentration camp, contrasts sharply with the art and inventions that celebrate human achievement along the Mall in Washington.

PHOTOS DEPICTING everyday life - a woman pushing a stroller, friends playing, a couple in an embrace: The images are common, but in the context of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum they form a striking figure covering the inner walls of a tower three-stories high. These images, 1,500 of them, of a town called Eishyshok before a Nazi invasion became the impetus for filmmaker and Oakland Mills resident Jeff Bieber to produce the film "There Once Was a Town." The documentary, which tells the stories of four Holocaust survivors and their pilgrimage to their childhood home of Eishyshok (then a city in Poland and now part of Lithuania)

The Public Broadcasting Service recently presented a two-hour documentary on the War of 1812, the so-called "forgotten war. " Well, they forgot to include the Battle of North Point, one of the few land battles the Americans won against the British. While the show went into great detail describing American failures under inept generals, it ignored Gen. Sam Smith and the few Army regulars, militiamen and ordinary citizens under his command who prevented the British from capturing Baltimore and laying siege to Fort McHenry from the land side.

Despite its promotion by The Sun last week, the recent PBS television program about the War of 1812 once again ignored the Battle of North Point, which was fought in 1814 around the area of what is now Dundalk-Edgemere. This seemed like a deliberate oversight, given the fact that the battle was covered in the show's companion book, "The War of 1812: A Guide to Battlefields and Historic Sites. " Granted, Fort McHenry is the star attraction of the 1812 war because it inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words of our national anthem.