FROM SELMA TO SOWETO
MONDAY, JANUARY 11 @ 11:00PM
Almost 50 years ago, South Africans began to realize that their freedom struggle had to be built in four arenas of action: mass action, underground organization, armed struggle, and international mobilization. These documentaries take viewers inside that last arena, the movement to mobilize worldwide citizen action to isolate the apartheid regime.
3D SPIES OF WWII
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10 @ 7:00PM & 12:00AM
During World War II, Hitler’s scientists developed terrifying new weapons of mass destruction. Alarmed by rumors of advanced rockets and missiles, Allied intelligence recruited a team of brilliant minds from British universities and Hollywood studios to a country house near London. Here, they secretly pored over millions of air photos shot at great risk over German territory by specially converted, high-flying Spitfires. Peering at the photos through 3D stereoscopes, the team spotted telltale clues that revealed hidden Nazi rocket bases.
CUSTER’S LAST STAND
TUESDAY, JANUARY 17 @ 6:00PM, 9:00PM & 12:00AM
On June 26, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and 261 members of his Seventh Cavalry were killed by Cheyenne and Lakota warriors, along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. Eleven days later, the news flashed across telegraph wires. Americans, still celebrating the nation’s 100th birthday, greeted the news with stunned disbelief. How could Custer, the Boy General of the Civil War, America’s most celebrated Indian fighter, the avatar of western expansion, have been struck down by a group of warriors armed with little more than bows and arrows? Like everything else about Custer, his martyrdom was shrouded in controversy and contradictions, and the final act of his larger-than-life career played out on a grand stage with a spellbound public engrossed in the drama. In the end, his death would launch one of the greatest myths in American history.
A CELEBRATION OF MUSIC
FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
MONDAY, JANUARY 16 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM
Tonight the President and First Lady will host the “In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement” concert, featuring songs from the Civil Rights Movement as well as readings from famous Civil Rights speeches and writings with participants including Bob Dylan, Jennifer Hudson, Smokey Robinson, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and more.
BILLY THE KID
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15 @ 11:00PM
On April 28,1881, 21-year-old Henry McCarty, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, just days from being hanged for murder, outfoxed his jailors and electrified the nation with the latest in a long line of miraculous escapes. An outlaw with a deadly reputation, the young man was finally gunned down by the ambitious sheriff Pat Garrett just a few weeks later. The felling of one of the most notorious criminals of the age made front-page news and marked the end of Henry — but it was the beginning of one of the West’s most enduring legends. Demonized by the lawman that killed him, the Kid was soon mythologized by a stream of dime store novels and big-screen dramas, portrayed by everyone from Paul Newman to Roy Rogers to Emilio Estevez. But in all the tellings, Billy the Kid’s real story has been obscured.
LET ME DOWN EASY
FRIDAY, JANUARY 13 @ 7:00PM & 12:00AM
Anna Deavere Smith’s latest production, Let Me Down Easy airs on Great Performances tonight. Originally presented at Long Wharf Theatre, the play received its New York premiere at Second Stage Theatre. The Great Performancesproduction was recorded in February 2011 in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater in Washington, DC, launching a national tour that concluded in September.
HERBIE HANCOCK, GUSTAVO DUDAMEL
& THE LA PHILHARMONIC CELEBRATE GERSHWIN
FRIDAY, JANUARY 6 @ 7:00PM & 12:00AM
Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel and Creative Chair for Jazz Herbie Hancock launched the LA Phil’s 2011/12 season with a sparkling George Gershwin gala at Walt Disney Concert Hall in September. “This is the first time as a professional musician that I’ll be playing a piece that’s essentially classical music with jazz overtones with a symphony orchestra, and what a symphony orchestra it is!” marvels Hancock just before the concert, referring to his keyboard work in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
TAKING ROOT: THE VISION OF WANGARI MAATHAI
THURSDAY, JANUARY 5 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM
TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai tells the story of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization encouraging rural women and families to plant trees in community groups, and follows Maathai, the movement’s founder and the first environmentalist and African woman to win the Nobel Prize. Maathai discovered her life’s work by reconnecting with the rural women with whom she had grown up. They told her they were walking long distances for firewood, and that clean water was scarce. The soil was disappearing from their fields and their children were suffering from malnutrition. “Well, why not plant trees?” she suggested.
BIRDS OF THE GODS
SUNDAY, AUGUST 25 @ 6:00PM
On the island of New Guinea in the South Pacific lives the most striking and diverse group of birds on the planet. Birds of paradise defy imagination. Covered in spectacular plumage, each species within the Paradisaeidae family is distinct. Some birds are patterned with feathers of bright yellow and green, some have flashy iridescent plumes that catch the light, while others have tails that extend three times the length of their body. Bizarre courtship displays by the male birds show off their exquisite assets, as they dance, puff out, vibrate, hang upside down, stretch their wings, and even contort their bodies into completely different shapes in order to impress a nearby female.
OPIUM BRIDES
TUESDAY, JANUARY 3 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM
In Opium Brides, award-winning Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi takes viewers deep into the remote Afghan countryside to reveal the deadly bargain local farm families have been forced to make with drug smugglers in order to survive.