WHAT: "Forgotten War: The Struggle for North America," a documentary on the French and Indian War produced by Mountain Lake PBS.
WHEN: 6 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday.
WEB SITE: www.forgottenwaron
line.org
MORE CLOSE TO HOME
Also airing during Mountain Lake PBS's Close to Home Week is a third documentary produced by the station: "The Collector's Edition of A Castle in Every Heart: The Arto Monaco Story," a recounting of the man who became an Adirondack legend and theme park pioneer.
Also airing starting Jan. 31 will be "Small Town, Big Dreams: Lake Placid's Olympic Story," a documentary presented by Mountain Lake PBS and American Public Television and produced in association with Sundial Pictures that chronicles how the tiny village of Lake Placid grew into a winter sports capital and gave the world the greatest hockey upset in Winter Olympic history — the Miracle on Ice. Many who participated in the 1980 Winter Olympics as sportscasters, course masters and competitors share their recollections of the historical event in a collection of interviews entitled "Winter Olympic Memories."
See the trailer for Small Town, Big Dreams at www.smalltown-bigdreams.com/trailer.html
See the schedule for those documentaries and other Close to Home programs at www.mountainlake.org/programming/close-to-home-2010.html.
Eric Stange, a Bostonian who specializes in historical documentary, and producer Damian Panetta from New York City. Mountain Lake staffer Karin O'Connell was associate producer and project researcher. Powers served as executive producer.
"Essentially, I got the project off the ground, pitched it and hired everyone to work. I acted as a supervisor."
EVERY EXPERT
Powers tapped every resource at the station.
"Every person was involved in some way — going on shoots, helping to organize things back here. No one was left out of the work. That's the nature of a big national project like this. It touched all of us."
The low budget of less than $300,000 was possible due to the more than 2,000 living history re-enactors who participated in the replay of the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga during the summer of 2008.
"We had many, many cameras there. We were the only people allowed to get really close. They allowed us to embed our cameramen in the action. Our cameramen wore period costumes. We could not have made this film (otherwise)."
The documentary's narrative arc includes the story of Rogers' Rangers, Abenaki and Iroquois nations, the Fort William Henry "massacre," expulsion of Acadians and the fall of Quebec and Montreal.
"We had virtually every North American expert on the French and Indian War participating in one way or another, whether we used them as interviews, research or background," Powers said. "We got an outpouring of support from the academic community. We wanted to make sure the facts and historical accuracy was right on. That's critical for any PBS documentary."
E-mail Robin Caudell at: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com
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