"Banned Together is a must-watch. At once inspiring, illuminating, enraging, and terrifying, the film captures the true threats of book banning and the power of young people and authors in fighting for the freedom to read!"

–Jonathan Friedman, PEN America

The Film:

A diverse cast of visionary teenagers, stirring public protests, private threats, criminal charges, and drama-filled school board meetings: this is the explosive world of Banned Together. The film pulls back the curtain on two of the most controversial issues in America today: book bans and curriculum censorship in public schools. Banned Together follows three students as they fight to reinstate 97 books suddenly pulled from their school libraries. As they evolve from local to national activists the film reveals the dark forces behind the accelerating wave of book bans in the U.S., and the continued harassment of educators and librarians.

Some of the people who are in the film, woven around the story about the student activists, include:

Congressman Jamie Raskin; bestselling and banned authors like Jodi Picoult, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Juno Dawson, Erika L. Sánchez, and Ellen Hopkins; First Amendment warriors like Jonathan Friedman from PEN America and Deborah Caldwell-Stone from the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom; Prof. Justin Hansford, the Exec Dir of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University School of Law; Maurice Cunningham, author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization; IL Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who wrote the first anti-book-ban legislation in the country ... and many more.