By means of her shingle Fairly Matches Productions, Sarah Jessica Parker is government producing Kim A. Snyder’s “The Librarians,” certainly one of 91 movies in Sundance’s 2025 Premieres lineup.
The function documentary follows a bunch of librarians, dubbed FReadom Fighters, who’ve resisted e-book bans in Texas, Florida and past. It’s produced by Snyder, Jana Edelbaum and Janique Robillard, and exec produced by Parker, Fairly Matches co-founder Alison Benson and Maria Cuomo Cole.
“It’s concerning the librarians throughout our nation who’ve been preventing towards these e-book bans,” Parker explains to Selection on the Crimson Sea Movie Pageant. “They’ve been standing as much as the ideology that stops youngsters from getting access to sure books and so they have put their very own lives and their household’s lives in danger, however they haven’t backed down.”
Parker’s dedication to the world of books and studying started as a baby, and he or she says that her love of books is without doubt one of the key traits that she shares along with her most well-known on-screen character, “Intercourse and the Metropolis’s” Carrie Bradshaw.
That keenness impressed Parker to begin a e-book membership and her personal publishing firm. It additionally just lately led to her current appointment to the judges panel of the celebrated U.Okay. literary award, the Booker Prize.
Parker grew to become conscious of “The Librarians” by way of producer Edelbaum (“Past Utopia: Escape From North Korea”). “She got here to us as a result of she was engaged on this documentary, and so they had been searching for further funding to determine a extra sturdy crew, and we cherished it,” Parker says.
The documentary function follows the work of the FReadom Fighters motion, based in October 2021 by Texas college librarians Becky Calzada, Carolyn Foote and Nancy Jo Lambert, after Texas lawmaker Rep. Matt Krause focused 850 books to be faraway from the state’s libraries, resulting in bans on books akin to “Catcher within the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Because the book-banning momentum expanded nationwide, so did the FReadom Fighters ranks, who organized conferences and created a Twitter/X account with 6,000 followers that revealed over 13,000 tweets about how books can change lives.
The documentary’s central character is Amanda Jones, a college librarian in southern Louisiana, who just lately wrote “That Librarian — The Combat In opposition to Ebook Banning in America,” revealed in 2024 by Bloomsbury. “It’s a improbable e-book, and we comply with her struggles,” explains Parker.
Snyder beforehand directed the Peabody award-winning documentary “Newtown,” which premiered at Sundance in 2016; “Classes from a College Capturing: Notes from Dunblane” which premiered at Tribeca in 2018; and “Us Children,” which was nominated for the 2020 Sundance Grand Jury Prize.
Parker has government produced a wide selection of tasks by way of Fairly Matches Productions, together with the “Intercourse and the Metropolis” spinoff “And Simply Like That,” fiction tasks starring Parker akin to HBO’s Golden Globe-nominated “Divorce” and “Blue Night time, and non-fiction tasks akin to “And Simply Like That… The Documentary” (2022).
The shingle is casting a widening web because it seeks out new tasks. Parker and Benson had been government producers, along with Bart Meuter and Jay Ruderman, on Miriam Guttmann’s “Entrance Row,” produced by Lea Fels and Isidoor Roebers. A couple of group of Ukrainian ballet dancers in exile who solid a front-line soldier who misplaced each his legs in a battle on the Ukrainian border with Russia, the movie premiered on the 2024 DocNYC movie pageant.
“I’ve a specific curiosity in ballet since I serve on the board of the New York Metropolis Ballet and I used to be a ballet dancer,” Parker says. “I used to be watching the information after I came across this story of the Ukrainian dancers who had been pressured to go away their houses and shaped this dance firm within the Netherlands. I shared the story with Alison, and we did some analysis and discovered there was a movie crew with them, so we jumped into the mission. When this Ukrainian soldier joined the corporate, the documentary took on a lifetime of its personal. It’s fairly beautiful.”
Parker says she has acquired adaptation rights to a number of books, together with one for a restricted sequence, and is ramping up improvement on different tasks: “Along with the present, we at present have a bunch of non-scripted documentaries, two scripted tasks and a film that we’re going to do subsequent 12 months.”
