What to watch this week

This is one of those moments in the calendar year I simply must stop giving “Independent Lens” dribs and drabs of bite-sized praise and devote an entire column to this feast of documentary wonder.

Don't get me wrong: There's nothing on TV right now quite as thrilling as watching hometown finalist David Cook turn 1980s pop songs into crazy power ballads on “American Idol.” And like you, I got suckered into that “CSI: Miami” two-parter last week.

Big-time network TV is big-time for a reason. But “Independent Lens,” which airs late nights every Tuesday when KCPT isn't begging for money, shows us that television wasn't just created to be a wall of blaring light and sound. By being small, intimate and honest, it can blow you away just as powerfully.

April has three “Independent Lens” features, none of which should be missed.

“Waters Flowing Together,” 10 p.m. Tuesday on KCPT, pays tribute to the legendary New York City Ballet dancer Jock Soto. Filmed during the final months of a remarkable 24-year career -- about twice the average ballet dancer's -- Soto was hailed as the “perfect partner,” someone who invariably pushed whoever his dancemate was to new heights of grace and physicality, always making it look easy.

As Soto's career is ending, filmmaker Gwendolen Cates' is just beginning. And what a debut! There's a scene early on in “Waters Flowing Together” that shows Soto in the studio rehearsing a piece, interspersed with video of him performing the same piece in concert. Cates just keeps cutting back and forth between the close-ups of Soto in gym sweats, and on stage, in costume, from the perspective of an audience member.

Even if the idea of attending the ballet makes you want to lock yourself in the bathroom, this double perspective of an artist at work will mesmerize you.

What makes Soto's career even more admirable is the hardscrabble background he comes from -- the son of Puerto Rican and Navajo parents who sold trinkets and hardly had a dime to their name. Soto lived off Hamburger Helper in New York until George Balanchine, in one of his final decisions as New York Ballet director, picked the 16-year-old prodigy.

Admirable as Soto is, Cates understands that ballet is not basketball, that the whole point of its athleticism is to make you forget that you are watching dancers but something else -- fluid, restless lines moving in almost otherworldly concert. Soto's gift is that he not only makes audience members feel this way, but his partners as well. Darci Kistler, a dancer with the New York Ballet, says she sometimes bursts into tears after performing with Soto. He's so dependable that she stops worrying about every little move. The result is akin to stepping on a cloud.

“It allows you to transcend and be somewhere else,” she says.

Next week (Apr. 15) “Independent Lens” turns its gaze to nutrition, or lack thereof, in the crowd-pleasing feature-length film “King Corn.” Two dudes in their 20s decide to take a cross-country trip. Then they decide to rent an acre in Iowa and grow maize on it. Then they decide to turn it into high-fructose corn syrup.

Along the way, they talk up a number of farmers, nutrition experts and other authorities who show how corn now makes up the lion's share of everything we eat when we eat out. “When you eat at McDonald's,” one expert explains, “you're eating corn.” The beef, the fry oil, the soda sweetener -- a-maiz-ing.

“King Corn” is just whimsical enough to make its educational message palatable. (You might say a spoonful of HFCS helps the medicine go down.) This is the movie that “Fast Food Nation” should have been.

There's nothing funny about “The Creek Runs Red” (Apr. 22), about the town of Picher, Okla., site of long-abandoned lead and zinc mines and now home of the notorious Tar Creek Superfund site.

Picher is on historic Route 66, and times were once very good for this town located just down the Mother Road from Baxter Springs, Kan., and Joplin, Mo. But mountains of contaminated chat now line the town, dominating the satellite view of Picher on Google. Ninety percent of the population has moved away. The mining companies are buried in litigation. (The latest multi-million-dollar settlement was reached last month by two Kansas City law firms.)

Perhaps most fascinating, the federal government isn't even trying to clean up Picher. It's buying out the residents -- at least, those who will move. “The Creek Runs Red” is about the people who have stayed through the years when their neighbors have left, why they keep their ties to the land, polluted though it may be, and what it will take to get them to leave.

All times Central.

TONIGHT

Hauling cargo sure doesn't sound like a premise for gripping TV fare, but tell that to the fans of “Ice Road Truckers.” Now, from the same producers comes “America's Port,” a series beginning 9 tonight on the National Geographic Channel. Filmed at the port of Los Angeles, the country's busiest, camera crews followed dockworkers and their bosses (including Geraldine Knatz, the port's new director and its first woman). With ships that can take two days to unload, and a worker killed on average every two months, there'd be plenty of drama even without the overwrought production values inspired by “24.”

TUESDAY

“The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo,” which won a special jury prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, airs at 9 p.m. on HBO. Lisa Jackson uses her 30 years in documentary filmmaking, and experience as a rape survivor herself, to coax stories out of the women shamed and shunned because they were violated by enemy soldiers in the Congo's ongoing civil war. Jackson's recklessness in gathering her shots -- at one point she goes out into the remote jungle region to interview rapists --underscores her passion to bring this long-overlooked scandal to a Western audience.

SATURDAY

“The Memory Keeper's Daughter,” an adaptation of the long-running bestselling novel, airs 8 p.m. CT on Lifetime. Dermot Mulroney plays the doctor who makes the fateful decision to secretly put his infant daughter, born with Down's syndrome, into an institution. Emily Watson plays the nurse he asks to do the deed, with implications that play out decades later.