Reading is freedom of speech, says ‘ABCs of Book Banning’ director – KCRW’s This…Is Interesting – Podcast en iVoox – iVoox

As the longtime head of documentary films at HBO, and then MTV, Sheila Nevins has won 32 individual primetime Emmys more than anyone else. She also earned four Peabody Awards, and has had a hand in more than two dozen Academy Award-winning documentaries. She made her directorial debut last year with The ABCs of Book Banning , which follows the recent push by conservative states and school districts to ban books about race and gender identity on campuses. Its also been nominated for best documentary short film at this years Oscars. Nevins tells KCRW that this topic hadnt been explored in documentary form before, plus she felt an urgency to tell this story, which she began during an election year. It was a political issue, not something that could wait because it was really about freedom of speech. It was affecting the smallest citizens in America, and they would one day be the voting population. She argues that the country was depriving children of the happiness of difference and the allowance of difference by stripping shelves of books about racial diversity and sexual preferences. If it was a book about two penguin daddies, it was off the shelf. If it was a book about an ambitious girl, it was pulled off the shelf. If it was about the fun of being in drag or being a drag queen, it was pulled off the shelf. Nevins points out that these banned books are age-appropriate. We're not giving books about how to deal with your menstruation to a 4-year-old girl. And we're not giving a 14- or 15-year-old girl a book about penguins. What particularly inspired Nevins was a 2023 video of 100-year-old Grace Lynn telling the Martin School Board in Florida that they couldnt take such books away from kids. She was motivating in a number of ways. We asked her to be in our film. And she was talking to a school board, which gave me the MO for the film. Nevins says she purposely centered her film on children because she believes some of the best documentaries are about the smallest experiences regular people have. You don't have to be famous to be an activist. You can be a regular person and you don't have to be young. And you might just as well be old. Because if you can move, you can fight. And if you can talk and you can think, you can try to make the world a better place. Nevins says that at first, she thought the book bans were limited to Florida, then discovered they were happening in school districts in more than 40 states. If you can afford it, you can go on Amazon and buy your book. It's not banned from America. But it's banned to people who maybe cannot afford to do those things and who need to read these books in public libraries and in school libraries. I mean, that's where it begins. Nevins film includes interviews with public school kids, whom she calls the littlest victims of these kinds of bannings. They want to know about their bodies. They want to know about racial difference. They want to know about world wars. They want to know about sexual preferences. Their uncle, their brother, their neighbor is gay, is trans. They want to understand that this world incorporates all this difference, Nevins says. They want to read these books. You cant take away reading. It's freedom of speech. It's the First Amendment.

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Reading is freedom of speech, says 'ABCs of Book Banning' director - KCRW's This...Is Interesting - Podcast en iVoox - iVoox