The Vietnam War, a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is an
eight-to-ten part (sixteen-to-twenty hour) documentary film series
that sheds new light on the military, political, cultural, social, and
human dimensions of a tragedy of epic proportions that took the lives
of 58,000 Americans and as many as three million Vietnamese, polarized
American society as nothing has since the Civil War, fundamentally
challenged Americans’ faith in our leaders, our government, and many
of our most respected institutions, and called into question the
belief in our own exceptionalism.
The film will be structured chronologically, built around interviews
and personal stories of nearly 100 American and Vietnamese witnesses —
veterans as well as civilians — who lived through the war. Their
intimate, personal “bottom up” testimony will be interwoven throughout
with a parallel “top down” political and military narrative that
reveals American and Vietnamese decision makers’ goals, decisions,
strategies, public pronouncements, and private concerns. With
unprecedented access to both individuals and archives in Vietnam, as
well as to provocative and revelatory recent scholarship and rarely
seen archival material from around the globe, this film will present a
groundbreaking 360-degree narrative of the war, telling the story from
all sides, as it has never before been told, and hopefully inspiring a
new conversation about this divisive period in our history.