One of the most acclaimed documentaries of 2025 was Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5. Like Peck’s powerful I Am Not Your Negro, the new film is another of the director’s masterful cross-historical montage projects, this one linking the doomsday futurism of 1984 through real world situations throughout history, and naturally to the current Orwellian/Trump-ian state of things. Perhaps inevitably, Peck’s film includes a segment about book burning/censorship, and its link to Nazi terror on backward, and forward.
Fast forward to now. For further “reading” and watching on the subject, proceed directly to the fairly chilling but important new film The Librarians, taking the issue to the front lines warriors of the current battle for rights and freedom of speech. Director Kim A. Snyder's skillfully assembled and topical saga, like Peck's film, dips into relevant and sometimes darkly kitschy film clips and sobering remnants of book burnings around the world, from the infamous 1939 Berlin bonfire to the one in Tennessee, of recent vintage.
But this historical and global backdrop frames the doc’s central point of focus, the scourge and surge of book banning efforts in America just within the past five years, particularly in Texas and Florida. Books on the hit list include many titles dealing with LGBTQ, race (including African-American authors and subjects), and sexuality, which parent-fueled groups are fervent about keeping out of the eyeshot of young children.