‘The Librarians’: Sundance Review

Dir. Kim A. Snyder. US, 2025. 92mins.

It’s hard to know how to categorise The Librarians, the latest documentary from Kim A. Snyder (Us Kids). Is this story of the vilification of librarians caught in the crossfire of America’s culture wars a horror film? A call to arms? Viewers outside of the US might see it as a cautionary tale, if not proof that parts of the US have gone beyond easy comprehension. Watching it at the start of Trump 2 leads to a sense of hopelessness for its persecuted protagonists, but how it goes down there is anyone’s guess: the provocations catalogued here make it clear that some aren’t in the mood for talking.

Urges that the time for debate has gone and society should wake up

The subject matter of The Librarians – modern-day book-banning – is bemusing, despite the fact that it has been widely reported in the press and on social media.  It’s enough in itself to hook the viewer straight away, but Snyder’s skill in teasing out the story make this a more dramatic piece. Straightforward and urgent, with a few pleasing cinematic touches, this Sundance premiere is a natural for a high-profile streaming pick-up, controversy, of course: possibly an awards run if only to further galvanise debate. Sarah Jessica Parker’s presence and vocal support as executive producer will only assist this in coming to a screen – if not a library – near you, 

Libraries everywhere are under threat – another documentary at Sundance, Kenya’s How To Build A Library, also illustrates how politics play a part in the preservation of heritage. In Europe, at least right now, the danger comes from funding cuts, not those who want to set fire to free thought. The Librarians is about school libraries, though, not the public type which graced Frederic Wiseman’’s elegant Ex-Libris (although the censorship issues are spreading to public libraries too). This documentary is set in the conservative districts of the US which have become the flashpoints for face-offs between the galvanised right and librarians caught on the back foot.

Thus we see a lot of Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, even New Jersey, where the typically reticent, skilled and overwhelmingly female librarian corps has come under attack.The Librarians takes as its start point the so-called Krause List, some 850 titles listed in a letter sent by Texas Republican Representative Matt Krause to the Texas Education Agency in 2021. It was supposedly a reaction to a House Bill which bans teaching materials that mean “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”

The list overwhelmingly targeted LGBTQ+ books (62 percent), those which deal with race and sex education, including fiction such as ’The Confessions of Nat Turner’ and non-fiction books ’The Reproductive System’, even ’Teen Legal Rights’ and ’A History Of The KKK’.  Focusing in particular on a school district in Granbury, Texas, The Librarians shows how the educators themselves somehow became responsible. When the Governor threatened to prosecute the school, the librarians were told: “Get rid of them all, now!’ With an added: “If that’s not what you believe, you better hide it.” 

As Snyder shows, Florida right-winger Ron DiSantis was quick to join the fray in a toxic debate inflamed by the so-called ‘Moms For Liberty’, set up to challenge classroom shut-downs during Covid-19 and looking for a new cause. The cancer spreads: Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood titles are targeted (’The Handmaid’s Tale’, of course) and a US cellphone network called Patriot Mobile starts to send funds to enable conservatives to win seats on local school boards across the country. And where you have emotions running this high at a school board level, in the US, you also get guns.

Snyder adds clips from films like Fahrenheit 451 and quotes George Orwell, but what’s happening in front of her lens seems more insane than Machiavellian. It turns out the last line of defence in US society really is the self-described ‘boring librarians’, themselves devout members of the Christian community they serve. Dubbed paedophiles and pornographers, they lose their jobs and have their tyres slashed and are forced to defend the system against incoherent attacks. There is no conversation. In its own way too, The Librarians is part of the polemic: it urges that the time for debate has gone and society should wake up to a threat that is only gaining power.

Many individual librarians are shown here, fearlessly standing up for what they believe to be right: the film also features the gay home-schooled son of a woman who has disowned him to prosecute her agenda through public meetings, hysterically documented on iPhones. It’s clear that waters need to be calmed or someone will be hurt, but The Librarians also shows that won’t happen unless people stand up and take action. So it’s a call to arms, then. But, be warned: a horror story too.