Seattle International Film Festival 2025: Film #3
A frustrating watch. Even to this Brit, these post-2020 attacks on books and librarians feels less like an attack on books qua books or the emancipatory potential of literature as such, but an emotionally valent front in a much broader (and more dangerous) backlash against the civil rights advances of the 2000s and the 1960s... and perhaps even Reconstruction itself. And yet the documentary seems to concentrate on the Great Nobility of Literature and the humble school librarian, and is content with the now discredited kind of political argument that, for instance, conflates pointing out Republican hypocrisies with an effective point and tries to outflank the censors on the Right by implying the 'real troops' are on the Liberal side. Rather 2000s-era Democrat rhetoric that I thought 2016 and 2024 had put to bed. It's not that I'm not in agreement with the film. Banning books actually harms children? Almost certainly true. But with that, you yield to the Right the principle of the corruptibility and sacred nature of youth that they can easily run with. The attack on librarians is also manifestly a gendered attack too, yet this dimension was curiously unexplored as well. I mean, when you have white men screaming like that in public, it's a fairly good bet that some deep contempt for women is at the heart of it.
Synopsis: Librarians unite to combat book banning, defending intellectual freedom on democracy's frontlines amid unprecedented censorship in Texas, Florida, and beyond.