Veteran documentary director and producer Kim A. Snyder (Us Kids, 2020; Newtown, 2016) delivers a stark look at the personal toll taken on local librarians in jurisdictions subject to political book-banning efforts. Primarily focusing on Texas, Florida and New Jersey, Snyder captures the hate and retribution cast upon those who speak out against state legislative and local school board committee efforts to remove objectional content from schools.
Snyder strategically picks several librarians with equally conservative individual backgrounds, each deep-rooted in their communities with long standing ties and decades of school service without any prior disciplinary issues prior to facing external mandates to remove books from their shelves. The librarians include an army veteran, a daughter and granddaughter of a Baptist priest, and a national librarian of the year winner, as well as a teacher who was also a former conservative podcaster and school board member, who all make heroic stands in the face of increasingly hostile crowds and social media attacks.
The film jumps between interviews and public hearing testimonies, weaving in historic news clips and classic movie footage, contrasted with literary quotes cleverly depicted by graphic text lifts from book pages to reinforce the historic predictability of fascist and discriminatory progression of a well-financed political movement behind the scenes. However, Snyder only glosses over the ethical and professional standards governing librarian management of their collections, and similarly only gives the obligatory facetime to the counter arguments, including one father’s plea to please don’t teach kids to hate our country. Without an in-depth analysis of how books end up in libraries in the first place, Snyder blunts her ability to further dismantle the grooming and recruitment nonsense which anchors much of the censorship advocacy.
The film admittedly ends in the middle of the constitutional fight, with a cautionary warning of an expansion and progression in new battlefronts. Snyder closes by effectively ringing warning bells by chronicling the unfortunate necessity of transforming our librarians from book stewards to constitutional vanguards, but a little more objectivity would have given the film even more punch.
On the KPCW sun rating system, "The Librarians" receives four out of five suns.
