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(approx. 26 min.)

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Lynn Novick Promo (15 sec.)

The new Ken Burns documentary THE WAR is a seven-part documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The series explores the history and horror of the Second World War from an American perspective by following the fortunes of so-called ordinary men and women who get caught up in the greatest cataclysm in human history.

Six years in the making, this epic 15-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.”

To learn more about THE WAR, visit http://www.pbs.org/thewar