The Librarians is set to premiere on PBS this Monday, Feb. 9, after a robust theatrical and festival run that saw Kim A. Snyder’s documentary earn awards across the country.
The film, executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, will air on Independent Lens, the long-running public television series presented by ITVS. It examines the coordinated effort by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty to ban a wide range of books at public schools and public libraries nationwide, and the abuse librarians have received for defending the right of children to access reading material, including books with anti-racist or LGBTQ themes. Some right-wing ideologues have gone so far as to accuse librarians of “grooming” kids.
Amanda Jones, one of the librarians who appears in the film, told the New York Times in 2024, “What we’re seeing now is full-scale attacks on people’s characters if they stand up for books. The hate level and the vitriol is unreal to me.”
‘The Librarians’ filmmaking team and documentary participants at Deadline’s Sundance Film Festival Portrait Studio on January 24, 2025 in Park City, Utah.
Michael Buckner for Deadline
Jones and fellow librarian Becky Calzada appeared in Deadline’s Sundance Studio last January along with Snyder and Parker.
“I’m from a very small town in Louisiana and I can’t even go out grocery shopping in my town,” Jones told us. “I’ve received death threats for the crime of giving a speech at the public library about how libraries are for everyone. And it’s not just an attack on librarians, but it’s attack on the books. But they’re also trying to devalue and defund libraries as a whole across the board.”
Calzada noted, “The current state of book banning… initially it started in Texas and has spread out through Louisiana, Florida, now even in Utah where we’re seeing even the state telling students that they can’t even bring a book that they personally own to school, that if it’s banned in their schools.”
Independent Lens/Cuomo-Cole Productions
The PBS debut of The Librarians comes amid indications of a significant pushback against book banning. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated Trump-endorsed Republican Leigh Wambsganss in a special election for a seat in the Texas state senate. Wambsganss, who is featured in The Librarians, had led an effort by conservatives to take over several school boards in 2022, allowing them to impose book bans.
Leading up to Saturday’s vote, the filmmakers held screenings of The Librarians in the area of north central Texas where the special election took place. They also screened the documentary in the Houston area last year before the November election for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District Board of Trustees, which saw three nonpartisan-moderate candidates replace incumbent conservatives, ending right-wing control of the board.
“Their campaigns reminded voters what’s at stake when extremists use classrooms to push politics instead of supporting kids,” wrote the Texas Freedom Network, which supported the election of the moderates. “Over the past several years, Cy-Fair’s far-right board majority, backed by deep-pocketed political groups, have divided the community and weakened support for students and teachers. They banned books, gutted librarian positions, imposed discriminatory policies targeting LGBTQ+ students, and prioritized culture wars over student success.”
This is far from the last word on the matter. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court “declined to hear an appeal on a Texas free speech case that allowed local officials to remove books deemed objectionable from public libraries,” PBS News reported. “The case stemmed from a 2022 lawsuit by a group of residents in rural Llano County over the removal from the public library of more than a dozen books dealing with sex, race and gender themes, as well as humorously touching on topics such as flatulence.”
The Librarians earned awards at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Dallas International Film Festival, Frameline in San Francisco, and two prizes at Woods Hole Film Festival in Massachusetts, and among other awards. It was nominated for Best Political Documentary at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards.
Snyder earned an Oscar nomination last year for Death by Numbers. Regarding The Librarians, she told Deadline that systems have long been in place whereby parents can work with librarians to limit their children’s access to books the parents find objectionable. This obviates the need for book bans, which apply to all students — even kids whose parents do not object to them reading “banned” books.
“What we want the public to understand is there has been a protocol in place of how to work these things out between librarians and parents. That has existed,” Snyder told Deadline at Sundance. “There are book challenges; that is not new. What is happening now is brazen breaking of protocol on a scope that has never been seen like this.”
Parker, the Sex and the City star, addressed possible reasons behind the surge of book banning in this country. “I sometimes feel as if it’s fear of children having information that might be counter to a home’s ideology, religion, political point of view,” she said. “And when young people have information, they might ask questions and that might be counter and it might feel as if there is conflict when in fact it’s really just healthy curiosity about subjects, people, religions, culture that is unfamiliar.”
She added, “The human part of it is very serious. The safety and wellbeing of these librarians who are pursuing the idea of education, the gateway to information and curiosity, for anybody to step in the way of the opportunity to learn is really tragic.”