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Kim Snyder’s new documentary “The Librarians” is a shocking look at the organized wave of book bannings sweeping the U.S. The director joined executive producers Sarah Jessica Parker and Alison Benson, as well as librarians Carolyn Foote and Suzette Baker, at the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox, to discuss this extraordinary assault on free speech.
“[The film] started with Carolyn actually,” Snyder said. “Over three years ago when this list of 850 books to be banned came out in Texas — mostly targeting books about race and gender.” Foote was among those who pushed back, speaking out at school board meetings, ultimately receiving extraordinary backlash and threats from right-wingers, who’ve been working to label any depictions of LGBT life or gender identity in books for children or teens (including even a picture book about a baby penguin raised by two male penguins) as “grooming” or “pornography.”
“It’s very organized,” Baker, who like Foote is from Texas, said of the work of groups such as Moms for Liberty, which have made book banning their top priority and have received major investments from billionaires and national political action committees. “I’ve watched them in commissioners’ meetings reading scripts that they downloaded off the internet as far as how to go about banning books, what you need to say, how you need to say it, how you need to fill the forms out.”
What started as targeted attacks on librarians in Texas and Florida has now become a national movement with book bannings being advocated for in states like New Jersey and New York as well.
“It was like pulling a thread that just kept coming out,” Snyder said. Added executive producer Benson, “We were like, when do you stop shooting? Because you could just go on and on and on.”
Sarah Jessica Parker felt particularly passionate about coming onboard “The Librarians” as an EP. The fact that she would journey to Sundance to lend her support to the film, goes a bit against the narrative that’s developed in the past couple of months about Hollywood figures keeping more quiet about political issues in the wake of the 2024 election. Parker doesn’t see advocating for librarians and freedom of literacy as an issue tied to any one election, though.
“I have not paid a great deal of attention, peripheral or not, about whether Hollywood is quiet or not,” Parker said. “But for us, vis a vis, this movie specifically, there’s nothing controversial to me about supporting our libraries, our librarians, and our public schools, and in our public spaces. And I’ve been that way my entire life. I was raised in a library. I’m one of eight kids, and if I didn’t have a library I don’t know who I’d be today. And that was because there was a librarian every place I went, no matter where I moved to, that pointed me in a direction. And I had parents who cared a huge amount about how to make my life more rich and still be appropriate. So whatever Hollywood is doing and how they are feeling is inconsequential to these people, these books, the idea of the access to freedom and information. It doesn’t really go hand in hand with the consequences of this particular election, more so what will it be moving forward.”
Watch the video of the full interview above.
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