Special Report: Behind the Lines (2024)

Strip a soldier's letter of its name, date and salutation, and the sentiments barely change: scared kids who want to be home. That idea drives Behind the Lines (2024), a new documentary in which actors, letter in hand, read wartime letters and emails from World War III to Iraq and Afghanistan, set against archival footage.

Director John B. Benitz and Andrew Carroll, founder of the War Letters Project, join Mike White to trace how a stage play, If All the Sky Were Paper, became a film. Carroll recalls the house fire, a cousin's Buchenwald letter and the 1998 Dear Abby column that set the project off. Benitz explains why he broke Ken Burns's rule by putting actors on screen, even though Burns's Better Angels Society helped sponsor the film.

They also dig into a Pearl Harbor sailor's letter held back for a year by censorship, Laura Dern's laryngitis the night before her studio session, a first cut of over three hours trimmed to ninety minutes, and a Japanese woman's apology, with a thousand folded cranes, to a family killed by a balloon bomb. Why do the funny letters matter as much as the harrowing ones?

Follow Behind the Lines on Instagram and visit the film's official website.

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