Sarah Jessica Parker on Producing Sundance Doc About Librarians Fighting Book Bans: ‘They Have Put Their Lives at Risk’
Through her shingle Pretty Matches Productions, Sarah Jessica Parker is executive producing Kim A. Snyder’s “The Librarians,” one of 91 films in Sundance’s 2025 Premieres lineup.
The feature documentary follows a group of librarians, dubbed FReadom Fighters, who have resisted book bans in Texas, Florida and beyond. It is produced by Snyder, Jana Edelbaum and Janique Robillard, and exec produced by Parker, Pretty Matches co-founder Alison Benson and Maria Cuomo Cole.
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“It’s about the librarians across our country who’ve been fighting against these book bans,” Parker explains to Variety at the Red Sea Film Festival. “They have been standing up to the ideology that prevents children from having access to certain books and they have put their own lives and their family’s lives at risk, but they have not backed down.”
Parker’s commitment to the world of books and reading began as a child, and she says that her love of books is one of the key traits that she shares with her most famous on-screen character, “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw.
That passion inspired Parker to start a book club and her own publishing company. It also recently led to her recent appointment to the judges panel of the prestigious U.K. literary award, the Booker Prize.
Parker became aware of “The Librarians” through producer Edelbaum (“Beyond Utopia: Escape From North Korea”). “She came to us because she was working on this documentary, and they were looking for extra funding to establish a more robust team, and we loved it,” Parker says.
The documentary feature follows the work of the FReadom Fighters movement, founded in October 2021 by Texas school librarians Becky Calzada, Carolyn Foote and Nancy Jo Lambert, after Texas lawmaker Rep. Matt Krause targeted 850 books to be removed from the state’s libraries, leading to bans on books such as “Catcher in the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
As the book-banning momentum expanded nationwide, so did the FReadom Fighters ranks, who organized meetings and created a Twitter/X account with 6,000 followers that published over 13,000 tweets about how books can change lives.
The documentary’s central character is Amanda Jones, a school librarian in southern Louisiana, who recently wrote “That Librarian — The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” published in 2024 by Bloomsbury. “It’s a fantastic book, and we follow her struggles,” explains Parker.
Snyder previously directed the Peabody award-winning documentary “Newtown,” which premiered at Sundance in 2016; “Lessons from a School Shooting: Notes from Dunblane” which premiered at Tribeca in 2018; and “Us Kids,” which was nominated for the 2020 Sundance Grand Jury Prize.
Parker has executive produced a wide array of projects through Pretty Matches Productions, including the “Sex and the City” spinoff “And Just Like That,” fiction projects starring Parker such as HBO’s Golden Globe-nominated “Divorce” and “Blue Night, and non-fiction projects such as “And Just Like That… The Documentary” (2022).
The shingle is casting a widening net as it seeks out new projects. Parker and Benson were executive producers, together with Bart Meuter and Jay Ruderman, on Miriam Guttmann’s “Front Row,” produced by Lea Fels and Isidoor Roebers. About a group of Ukrainian ballet dancers in exile who cast a front-line soldier who lost both his legs in a battle on the Ukrainian border with Russia, the film premiered at the 2024 DocNYC film festival.
“I have a particular interest in ballet since I serve on the board of the New York City Ballet and I was a ballet dancer,” Parker says. “I was watching the news when I came upon this story of the Ukrainian dancers who had been forced to leave their homes and formed this dance company in the Netherlands. I shared the story with Alison, and we did some research and found out there was a film crew with them, so we jumped into the project. When this Ukrainian soldier joined the company, the documentary took on a life of its own. It’s pretty exquisite.”
Parker says she has acquired adaptation rights to several books, including one for a limited series, and is ramping up development on other projects: “In addition to the show, we currently have a bunch of non-scripted documentaries, two scripted projects and a movie that we’re going to do next year.”
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