FILM OF THE WEEK: The Librarians - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

At a moment when the United States is undergoing a rapid and alarming mainstreaming of authoritarian instincts, Kim A. Snyder’s new documentary The Librarians arrives as both a dispatch and a warning. For all the noise about border walls, “parental rights,” and flag-waving patriotism, the Republican project appears to rest on a very old authoritarian truth: fascism requires ignorance, and ignorance thrives when books are pulled from shelves, history is rewritten, and curiosity is cast as dangerous. No society that has banned books is remembered fondly. The regimes that did so are synonymous with fear, repression and violence. Yet the American right seem at ease with the company they keep, shrugging off historical parallels as if there's prestige in aligning with inquisitors and censors.

Snyder, a seasoned filmmaker who has received a Peabody and an Oscar nomination, chooses to open her film with an unsettling quote: a line from Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s classic tale of state-mandated book burning. From there, the documentary drops us into the shadows of a Texas classroom where a librarian- face obscured and voice hushed as if she were a criminal confessing or a person in witness protection - recalls what it feels like to be targeted not by gangsters or cartels, but by politicians and self-appointed guardians of morality. In 2021, Texas legislator Matt Krause circulated his now-infamous list of 850 suspect titles. It was heavy with books about race and queerness, and Governor Greg Abbott soon escalated the demand for removals under the banner of protecting children from “pornographic material.” It is telling that their definition of pornography extends to memoirs by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian warnings about authoritarian regimes, and instructional texts about tolerance.

The use of anonymity at the start portrays the stakes. What's more compelling are the portraits of and interviews with the librarians who follow. Women like Suzette Baker in Llano County, sacked for refusing to empty the shelves of work by Black and queer authors, or Amanda Jones in Louisiana, who turned her harassment into a memoir/battle cry titled That Librarian. They are not radicals in the familiar sense. They are career librarians, many with military or religious backgrounds, who suddenly find themselves branded as paedophiles or pornographers for insisting that libraries serve everyone.

Snyder’s documentary is most alive during moments of confrontation. We watch town hall meetings in Texas and Florida where eloquent high school students speak in defence of their right to read, only to be jeered by adults. We hear from a New Jersey librarian, Martha Hickson, who uncovered the fingerprints of Moms for Liberty, a conservative pressure group whose mission statement is less about parental empowerment than about enforcing conformity. Hickson, like others, was slandered as a groomer for daring to put LGBTQ books on the shelves. The vitriol, as one Florida pastor notes in the film, is not about “protecting innocence”, but the calculated erasure of Black history, queer identity, and any perspective that unsettles the myth of a pure, white, heterosexual America.

What rescues the film from despair is its embrace of resistance, sometimes from unexpected quarters. We meet the teenagers of the Granbury Banned Book Club, who turn censorship into solidarity. We see a former school board member who, after parroting anti-library talking points on a podcast, experiences a change of heart and is ostracised by her old allies. These are glimpses of conscience that remind us that censorship is not only corrosive to democracy, but to personal integrity.

Snyder and her editor Mark Becker stitch together archival footage with a keen eye for historical resonance. Clips of Joe McCarthy, 1950s anti-Communist book bans, and Nazi bonfires dissolve into recent images of conservative groups torching texts in Tennessee. Snippets from The Twilight Zone and Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 underscore the cyclical nature of these panics. The message is unmistakable: every generation thinks itself immune to authoritarian temptation, yet here we are again, watching statehouses legislate against literature.

There is an irony to all this. Libraries are one of the few democratic spaces left in America. They're open to anyone, free of charge, a place where the unemployed and the affluent, the immigrant and the local can sit side by side. By attacking librarians, Republicans are not only narrowing the syllabus for students; they are chipping away at one of the last institutions where civic equality is practiced rather than preached.

For an Irish audience, The Librarians may feel both distant and familiar. Our own culture wars do not map neatly onto America’s, but the strategy is recognisable, particularly when we consider those who have recently attacked sex educators, sex-ed curriculums in schools, and the acknowledgement of trans students; those who weaponise children, moralise about obscenity and insist that acknowledging difference is a threat. Snyder’s film is a reminder that once you begin deciding which books are acceptable, you will eventually decide which people are acceptable. And history tells us where that leads.

In a time when rights are being rolled back across America with dizzying speed, this documentary reminds us that the librarians - underpaid, maligned, occasionally in hiding - emerge as the guardians of democracy’s most fragile promise: that everyone has the right to read, and to think.

• Out now. Directed by Kim A. Snyder. 92 mins. Watch the trailer below