THE LIBRARIANS – ★★★

Documentary about librarians in the US in the more backward states who are being forced to remove books from their libraries, and are being ostracised in their communities. Somewhat predictable situation, and well enough told, but I find myself being less and less surprised about things like this in the current US environment. The two main thoughts I had was that: 1) This documentary is likely to effect little change – the left wing people will be outraged, and the right wing people will not change their minds. I’d probably prefer a harder journalistic investigation into where the money comes from to support these backward initiatives, and who is financially benefiting from them. And, 2) it’s a real pity that libraries are being told to pull books off shelves due to the fragility of the right wing religious folk, but in 2025, it’s going to be super-easy for any student to get access to the content in other ways if they want it. Aside from the copyright infringing options which are very easy to access, it’s not hard to get membership to libraries with digital collections outside the area you live in. It’d actually be cool if (say) Californian public libraries promoted themselves to students in Texas/Florida/etc and allowed them to get easy access to the material.