THE WAR, a co-production of Florentine Films and WETA Washington, DC, is a seven-part, 14-hour film directed and produced by Burns and his longtime co-producer, Lynn Novick. The film will premiere on Sunday, September 23, 2007, on PBS.

Six years in the making, this epic 14-hour film, reminiscent in scope and power of Burns’s landmark series The Civil War, focuses on the stories of citizens from four geographically distributed American towns — Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and the tiny farming town of Luverne, Minnesota.

These four communities stand in for — and could represent — any town in the United States that went through the war’s four devastating years. Individuals from each community take the viewer through their own personal and quite often harrowing journeys into war, painting vivid portraits of how the war dramatically altered their lives and those of their neighbors, as well as the country they helped to save for generations to come.

“The Second World War was so massive, catastrophic and complex, it is almost beyond the mind’s and the heart’s capacity to process everything that happened and, more important, what it meant on a human level,” said Burns.

By focusing on the personal stories of ordinary Americans who had extraordinary experiences, the film tries to bring one of the biggest events in the history of the world down to a very intimate scale. And in the end, we all begin to see that there are no “ordinary lives.”

PBS and local public television stations will be airing a range of related programming throughout the summer and fall, leading up to and around THE WAR. Among the nationally broadcast programs will be Justice for My People: The Hector García Story as well as a Bill Moyers Journal interview with Medal of Honor winner Jose Lopez. There will also be local productions, a range of outreach initiatives and oral history projects that will include Latino veterans.


Visit The War-PBS website