Aspen Filmfest highlights intellectual freedom with screening | Jennika Ingram, The Aspen Time
September 18, 2025
Aspen Filmfest will screen the documentary, “The Librarians,” following librarians in Texas and Florida who have become unexpected heroes in the fight against book banning.
The screening will take place at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 19, Aspen Film Isis Theatre. A Q&A with the filmmakers will follow.
The 2025 film made its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival before continuing on to other film festivals, highlighting the librarians’ courageous stand for intellectual freedom. Academy Award-winning Kim A. Snyder directs, with Maria Cuomo Cole co-producing and Sarah Jessica Parker serving as executive director.
“Our librarians have emerged as the superheroes that they are,” Cuomo said.
The film trailer, released in early September 2025, has received more views than anticipated for a documentary, and has been described as very popular by the filmmakers. It received more than 150,000 views at the time of printing. The U.S. theatrical release is set for Oct. 3.
“It’s a big number for a documentary film, and it means that people really care about this issue,” Cuomo said. “It means, of course, that people really care about book banning. People want to become educated about book banning in the country and they care about librarians.”
The filmmakers have been inundated with requests for screenings since the trailer came out.
According to the filmmakers, some of the titles challenged include classics like, “1984,” “Animal Farm,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and contemporary works like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”
“There are a very high number of classics they banned,” Snyder said of Texas and Florida.
Synder recalled the key moment she knew she would make the film.
“I saw a news story, and I immediately called Maria, which was about this prose list.”
The prose list is an Index of School Bans report regarding novels and memoirs, shared by the non-profit PEN America (a nonprofit advocating for freedom of expression). Currently, according to PEN America, more than 10,000 book bans took place in public schools during the 2023-24 school year.
“And then we read about this group of FReadom Fighters, who were speaking about this and beginning to organize,” Snyder said of the surge of book bans that intensified around 2021-22.
The FReadom Fighters are a group of librarians that support intellectual freedom, whose website states, “We believe in the right to read.”
The film captures librarians speaking out against censorship.
“Part of the ethics of our profession is to fight censorship and support the First Amendment,” one librarian said in the film trailer.
Another added, “I have former students reach out to me, and tell me books have saved them, I am going to speak out about it.”
Synder and Cuomo have completed five films together over the course of 13 years, including “Newton” (2016), “Lessons from a School Shooting: Notes from Dunblane” (2018), “Us Kids” (2020), and their latest project, “The Librarians” (2025).
“It’s like pulling a thread — you get into it and then you can’t get out,” Synder said of embarking on this film.
Cuomo added that sticking with this film for the past three and half years might be fortuitous, because it seems to be striking a chord now in 2025 that it might not have initially.
The filmmakers believe the film transcends party lines.
“We have people come up to us quite regularly and say, ‘I’m a moderate Republican,’ or ‘I’m a libertarian — this is reaching me.’ It’s an issue that certainly shouldn’t be partisan,” Synder said.
As one figure early in the film notes, “politicians are playing a dangerous game when they try to make school libraries battlegrounds for political agendas.”
The trailer can be watched at ocofilms.com/films/the-librarians/. For more information and tickets, go to aspenfilm.org/event/filmfest-the-librarians/. Aspen Film Isis Theatre is located at 406 E. Hopkins Ave.