How Ken Burns Polished a ‘Diamond in the Rough’ With His New Documentary (Exclusive Video)

The Sharps’ War’ filmmaker Artemis Joukowsky shot the movie before he brought on Burns

Ken Burns is the big name attached to the PBS documentary Defying the Nazis:

The Sharps’ War, but the famed director says his work was just polishing already great material from co-director Artemis Joukowsky.

The film documents the work of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who left their children behind to help save hundreds of imperiled political dissidents and Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi occupation across Europe.

Joukowsky had begun working on the project in the 8th grade, when he was assigned to write a paper about someone who displayed great courage.

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“All those lives lost, all those possible Nobel prizes, all those possible cures and medicine, all that great art that we’re missing,” he continued.