Hi r/movies! We’re Sarah Botstein & David Schmidt, co-directors of the new PBS series The American Revolution & longtime collaborators at Florentine Films (co-founded by Ken Burns). We’ve worked on other docs like Jazz, The War, Prohibition, The Vietnam War, Hemingway, and more. Ask us anything!

Hi r/movies! We’re Sarah Botstein & David Schmidt, co-directors of the new PBS series The American Revolution & longtime collaborators at Florentine Films (co-founded by Ken Burns). We've worked on other docs like Jazz, The War, Prohibition, The Vietnam War, Hemingway, and more. Ask us anything!

Here are the first 10 minutes of our new docuseries, The American Revolution:

All episodes are now streaming!

Thirteen American colonies unite in rebellion, win an eight-year war to secure their independence, and establish a new form of government that would inspire democratic movements at home and around the globe. What begins as a political clash between colonists and the British government grows into a bloody struggle that will engage more than two dozen nations and forever change the world.

Sarah's Bio:

Sarah Botstein has produced some of the most popular and acclaimed documentaries on PBS. She is currently producing and co-directing The American Revolution along with Ken Burns and David Schmidt. Her previous work includes Jazz, The War, Prohibition, The Vietnam War, College Behind Bars, and Hemingway. The U.S. and the Holocaust marked Botstein's debut as a co-director. Botstein works closely with PBS LearningMedia to develop educational materials as part of the Ken Burns Classroom, and she was an original contributor to Ken Burns's UNUM. In addition to The American Revolution, Botstein is working on a three-part series about Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society.

David's Bio:

David Schmidt is the producer and co-director, along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, of The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour series premiering on PBS in the fall of 2025. Schmidt began working with Florentine Films as a researcher and apprentice editor for The Roosevelts (2014), while also supervising the documentary’s seven-episode script. His research on The Vietnam War (2017) won him the Jane Mercer Footage Researcher of the Year award, and he also worked closely on that project with writer Geoffrey C. Ward and helped coordinate postproduction. With Burns, Schmidt also produced the two-part biography Benjamin Franklin (2022) for PBS. A graduate of Dartmouth College with a degree in history, Schmidt grew up on the Virginia Peninsula within the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown—each site only minutes from his childhood home. He spent his summers working in the living history museum in Colonial Williamsburg and on the archaeological dig at Historic Jamestown. Those childhood experiences led him to pursue a career telling American history.

Ask us anything! We'll be back today Wednesday at 3:00 PM ET to answer your questions 🙂