Two new documentaries advocate in distinct ways for the freedom to read and for access to libraries. Banned Together, a 2024 film festival award-winner now streaming on Apple+ and Amazon Prime, follows three young activists who take on school board book bans in Beaufort, S.C., and extend their vision to a national scale. Free for All: The Public Library, debuting on PBS Independent Lens on April 29, traces the history of the library as a civic institution in the U.S. Both films were in production well before the 2024 election, yet their subjects remain relevant to our current moment.
'Banned Together'
Banned Together follows high school students Millie Bennett, Isabella Troy Brazoban, and Elizabeth Foster, who combat efforts to ban books in their home of Beaufort County, S.C. The three became anti-censorship crusaders in 2022, when they learned that books were being removed from school library shelves and began speaking out at school board meetings. Footage includes scenes of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty; censorship conflicts in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Texas; and people in Charleston, S.C., reading sexual passages aloud at public meetings as anti-censorship activists chant, “Read the whole book!” All too often, the film notes, controversial books go unread by their detractors, who point to provocative sentences without context.
Plans for the documentary gained momentum in 2023, when Atomic Focus Entertainment co-founder and executive producer Jenn Wiggin and her husband Tom Wiggin saw an article about the students’ activism. “Turns out, Kate Way was already doing a short film about it,” co-producer Allyson Rice told PW. Atomic Focus “thought this was a bigger film and suggested we collaborate.”
The filmmaking team, with Way as director, arranged meetings between the teenagers and proponents of freedom to read including author Jodi Picoult, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, and Justin Hansford, executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University School of Law. In the film, Raskin tells the young women that “book banning is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.” Picoult, whose novel Nineteen Minutes is frequently banned for its account of gun violence, tells the students that censors are “afraid that you might grow up to think differently than they do.”
While making Banned Together, “We saw that it was important to do the micro and the macro side,” Rice explained. “We had to get to know the community, and we had to figure out how to weave the larger national picture around the local story that was unfolding” in the teens’ home state.
“We were hoping to get the film out ahead of the election” in 2024, Rice said. “Our editor, Charnelle Quallis, normally takes at least nine months to do a feature film, and she worked fast. We were frantically trying to get done with licensing and permissions, and we ended up finishing in the fall,” still waiting on distribution.
Banned Together’s networking game is strong, with partners and sponsors from the Gates Foundation, PEN America, PFLAG, and Interfaith Alliance, among others. The team contacted the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans program, offering Banned Together free of charge for public library screenings. During Banned Books Week, it was an official selection at the 2024 Awareness Festival in Los Angeles, and on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, the filmmakers scheduled a national watch party. On June 17, Banned Together will be shown at filmmaker Michael Moore’s Traverse City (Mich.) Film Festival.
As for the three youth activists, they’re in college now, and Foster recently wrote about her experiences in Teen Vogue.
'Free for All'
Free for All: The Public Library takes a different approach to conveying the value of access to reading material and community services. Director, producer, and narrator Dawn Logsdon and co-director and producer Lucie Faulknor use a combination of contemporary footage and archival material from more than 120 collections to detail the cultural history and the present-day variety among U.S. libraries.
The film was in the works for more than a decade, the creators told PW. “We got our first grant in 2014 from the California Humanities, and we got our major production funding in 2018 from the National Endowment for the Humanities,” Logsdon said. Along the way, their vision for Free for All shifted. Where first they wanted to tell the story of “one big fascinating urban main library,” Logsdon said, “we ended up falling in love with the history and having a million disparate stories from all across time and needing a way to try to structure them together.” They kept seeking state and federal grants and crowdfunded through Kickstarter, attracting just under 1,000 donations.
As the project grew, Logsdon and Faulknor—both of whom live in the Bay Area—crossed the country finding libraries and people to feature, from Boston Public Library’s palatial Central Library to Midwestern small-town branches to urban libraries where patrons job hunt, access basic medical needs, and attend theatrical performances.
A “silver lining” to all that travel was the chance to “look into archives for things that hadn’t been digitized yet,” Faulknor said. “Libraries are great at holding stories and telling other stories, but they’re not good at telling their own stories.” In San Francisco, they happened upon “a closet full of old tapes” from a basement recording studio that included “these great PSAs from [actor] Robin Williams.” Not everything made it into the film, but the treasure hunt kept them excited about the project.
The filmmakers thought they were almost finished in early 2020, but then “all the libraries closed down and we couldn’t access all the high-resolution materials and license all the archival material,” Logsdon said. She commented that “we went from a musty old history story to being on the cusp of a lot of disasters and crises,” among these the threat to library funding. The film became an argument for the library as a vital public institution where patrons from all walks of life find common ground.
By the time they completed production, the PBS air date was right around the corner, too late for the festival circuit. “Independent Lens offered to make us part of a program called Indie Lens Pop-Up,” a program in which local organizations and channels host film events, Logsdon said. “They told us to expect 30–40, and we now are at over 400” discussion screenings to public audiences.
Now, Logsdon said, “Our big mission is to keep these in-person viewings and conversations going.” The feedback from a watch party reinforces the library’s idealistic community spirit, she has discovered. “It’s one thing to watch [Free for All] on your phone or at home in your living room, even with your family, but it’s another thing to watch it with your community and have a discussion about what’s happening in your library.”
