Following his successful documentary series on World War II, American director Ken Burns has planned to revisit the Vietnam War.

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced the new project on Monday and said the 10- to 12-hour series will be released some time in 2016.

 

Burns mentioned a Vietnam project in 2007 when promoting his series on World War II. At the time, Burns said he wanted to wait until veterans were ready to share their advanced perspective on the war.

 

“Today, more than four decades after it ended, nearly everyone has an opinion about the Vietnam War, but few Americans truly know its history and there is little consensus about what happened there, or why,” Burns said, in a statement. “Our series will shed light both on the history of the war, and on our inability to find common ground about it.”

 

The series, entitled VIETNAM, will incorporate on-camera interviews with witnesses, third person narration, archival footage and photographs, music, sound effects and live cinematography.

 

The producers will travel to Vietnam to film the now silent battlefields and to conduct interviews with Vietnamese participants.

 

To provide a sense of how the war overseas was experienced on the home front, the series will interweave the television news reports that vividly brought the fighting into American living rooms night after night. TV and radio newscasts will also provide invaluable cultural contextualization through their coverage of politics, popular culture, the growing generational divide, and the anti-war and civil rights movements.

 

Popular music of the era, particularly rock and roll and rhythm and blues, will infuse the series with the sensibility of the war years.