Prolific U.S. documentarian Ken Burns graced the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Friday, with attendees hanging onto his every word at the city’s Central Hall.

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Burns, an Oscar nominee best known for acclaimed works Brooklyn Bridge (1981), The Civil War (1990), Jazz (2001) and The Vietnam War (2017), spoke eloquently about putting on screen history, politics and war, prompting a standing ovation at the end of the session. He covered his vast array of projects and culturally rich career over the course of an hour, including his most recent six-part series The American Revolution, with host Dave Calhoun.

Among the highlights was Burns talking about why his Barack Obama documentary remains unreleased despite filming eight two-hour interviews with the former U.S. president, and the one sacrifice he feels he’s made by sticking with long-time distribution partner PBS over premium cable or streaming service.

The conversation was interspersed with clips from Burns’ best work, such as The American Revolution, and the filmmaker touched on the story of a German officer’s wife who “heard Americans eat cats” as she made her passage across the Atlantic to war-torn 18th-century America. “In our last election cycle, that was a big thing,” said Burns, referencing President Trump’s unfounded claim during a 2024 presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their pets.

This prompted Burns to talk about the cyclical nature of world events and how some parallels to current-day politics spooked him into cutting certain parts from the American Revolution doc. “Thomas Jefferson wrote a constitutional convention […] and said, ‘What if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes?’ And I had that in, and then we had a line that said Alexander Hamilton was concerned too. [He said], ‘What if someone should melt hobby horses with popularity and create chaos? No man is above the law.’”

“After Trump was re-elected, I said, ‘It’s gonna be so obvious.’ People are gonna say I put that in [on purpose]. So we pulled it out,” said Burns, again alluding to the current U.S. leader who has consistently accused Joe Biden of election fraud in 2020.

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He also discussed staying loyal to PBS, explaining that the Vietnam project took 10-and-a-half years to make because the fundraising process was “so frustrating.” He continued: “And I could have walked into a premium cable or streaming service and in one pitch gotten that $30 million. What they wouldn’t have given me is control. They would have wanted it in a year and a half or two years. I could not have done The Vietnam War in that time, and I would have had layers of suits, as we call them, giving me notes too long, too short, too violent, not violent enough.”

It made Burns realize “how fortunate” he was, and that he was losing “nothing in quality of life” by living in rural New Hampshire. “I gain from it a healthy relationship with nature,” he continued about living a little off-grid in a town called Walpole. “The only thing I sacrificed was this: the society of my colleagues, and I am sad that that’s a casualty of it.”

Calhoun asked Burns for an update on his Barack Obama documentary, to which Burns said he’s “waiting for the dust to settle” on Obama’s U.S. presidency. He has, however, filmed eight interviews with the ex-world leader. “The last one was in 2024. We decided to wait to do it, til the dust settles. Dust hasn’t settled, and so hopefully it does settle, and we’ll be able to do it. And then I will probably wait many years because we want to escape the specific gravity of [his presidency], get out of that dialect and get into the range [of] new scholarship… Unfortunately, the current occupants are so constipated the scholarship hasn’t been as much as you would expect on Obama yet, even though we’re 10 years out of his presidency.”

Industry speakers at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, running Aug. 14-21, include Christine Vachon, Ewan McGregor and Kenneth Branagh.

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