The prolific documentarian’s latest project, ‘American Buffalo,’ explores the near extinction of the majestic animals—as well as the Native Americans who depend on them.
“It’s too easy to subscribe to some wholly pessimistic or wholly optimistic, rosy view of things,” Burns says, mentioning the sign to me over Zoom. “We’ve got to use the tools we’re given at the particular moment to understand and parse it.” In Burns’s latest two-part documentary, American Buffalo, which he made with two longtime collaborators, writer Dayton Duncan and senior producer Julie Dunfey—airing on PBS October 16 and 17—it’s hard to see the optimism through the tragedy.
It’s one thing to be inclusive of other ideas that you’re sympathetic to, but more or less that always seems to gravitate into some paternalism or even patronizing. And we didn’t want to do that. Americans, and arguably most humans, love a story of triumph. Maybe this is my own existential dread revealing itself, but it seems that you can only have triumph if you have tragedy. Do you see it that way? I think you may be at the heart of the whole human condition there.
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