‘The Librarians’ Are Here To Save Us

The Librarians deftly illuminates the last four years of organized and systemic censorship, a reality as alarming as the piles of burning books the film features onscreen.

The documentary, which premiered at Sundance and recently screened at South by Southwest, spotlights the bibliophiles of its title as warriors in the fight for intellectual freedom. Administrators fired many of the librarians featured after they refused to take books off the shelves or questioned calls to cull their collections.

Some share their stories in the shadow of anonymity. But there’s Suzette Baker, an Army veteran and former head librarian at Llano County’s Kingsland Branch Library in Texas, just west of Austin. County officials fired her after she refused to remove books, triggering a legal battle the county settled March 6. Baker leads the film crew into the children’s section, quipping, “where we keep our pornography.” And there’s Amanda Jones, the Library Journal’s 2021 Librarian of the Year, who details the death threats and security measures that followed her advocacy for books with LGBTQ themes.

The subject list is a Who’s Who of anti-censorship advocates, especially in Texas. That’s where state Rep. Matt Krause issued a list of 850 books to school superintendents, asking them to identify whether their districts owned the titles. The 2021 list was one of the sparks that ignited record-breaking waves of censorship in school and public libraries across the country, documented by multiple groups including PEN America and the American Library Association.

But director Kim A. Snyder (Newtown, the Oscar-nominated Death by Numbers) wisely is less interested in the stats than the people. Her subjects in The Librarians share their frustrations and fears as they walk through their former libraries, sit around the kitchen table, and leave library and school board meetings. Snyder uses meeting clips to great effect, highlighting hyperbolic complaints from lawmakers and Moms for Liberty, who presumably didn’t want to defend their positions in front of her cameras.

Jones’ segments are particularly poignant, with her parents circulating in the background. She says they didn’t speak to her for a week after death threats started coming; her mother pats her shoulder and calls her “my outspoken daughter” with a rueful smile. Jones sheds tears as she recalls former students from her small Louisiana parish who died by suicide, a reality she says keeps her fighting to preserve LGBTQ stories on the shelves.

We also meet Weston Brown, who saw a viral clip of his mother Monica decrying what she said was porn on school shelves in Granbury, Texas, outside of Fort Worth. He shares how his parents ousted him from family gatherings and contact with his siblings after he told them he was gay. We watch as he speaks to school board members and news cameras outside meetings, while his mother captures it all on her phone from a distance before turning her back and striding away into the parking lot.

It was a relief to see Florida Rev. Jeffrey Dove, a Black pastor who has spoken out against censorship at school board meetings. While LGBTQ books are among the most targeted, so are books by and about people of color: PEN America’s most recent tally estimated that 44 percent of books banned in the 2023-24 school year fell in this category. Dove shares Matthew Cherry’s picture book Hair Love with his church youth group, and we see him waiting out a board meeting to chastise members for their decisions to pull certain books. It would have been ideal for a film about inclusion to include more non-white faces.

Still, The Librarians is a stellar exploration of what’s driving this most recent wave of censorship and the human toll of advocacy. It amplifies the bravery of regular folks speaking out by showing what they’ve sacrificed. It would take a hard heart indeed to walk away not feeling inspired to join the fight.