Perhaps you can’t imagine why you would commit yourself to a 14-hour film about the Roosevelts. Yes, Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States, has his face up on Mount Rushmore; sure, we know that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were hugely significant political figures. But 14 hours, over seven episodes? The film’s creator, the American documentarian Ken Burns, has a snappy one-liner to pull you in. He grins at me conspiratorially over his Caesar salad. “This is the American Downton Abbey,” he says. “Except it’s all true.”
It is hard to overstate the importance of Burns’s work when talking about documentary cinema in the US. An independent film-maker who has built his career by working with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the American non-commercial TV station, he first came to wide public attention with the broadcast of The Civil War. This epic, 11 and a half hours long, was the highest-rated series in the history of PBS: 40 million people watched its premiere in 1990.
Content from our partners
