Free Community Film Screening
Telegraph Hill Dwellers, in partnership with The Savoy Tivoli, will host a free film screening with Q&A following with Lucie Faulknor, Producer and Co-Director.
Sunday, November 9 at 3 PM
Savoy Tivoli, 1434 Grant Avenue, San Francisco
Home viewing is available to PBS Passport members at PBS.org. For information on hosting a community screening, visit freeforallfilms.org.
by Kathi Wheater
“Our apartment building on Fielding Alley is a ‘Macondray Lane’ kind of thing, right out of Armistead Maupin’s novel, Tales of the City. We lived in the same building with North Beach community leader Gerry Crowley for many years, who inspired us with her commitment to the importance of the public commons in our neighborhood. Our upstairs neighbor Susan Hughes told us about the library that we feature in Wisconsin, because she’s from a little farming community there. So, we had a real building brainstorm going on.”
Dawn Logsdon and Lucie Faulknor, producing and life partners, are reminiscing about the first days of imagining, 11 years ago, what would become their feature-length documentary film FREE FOR ALL: The Public Library. The 84-minute film tells the extraordinary story of how a simple idea shaped a nation and the quiet revolutionaries who made it happen.
Dawn Logsdon grew up in New Orleans and had visited about 100 public libraries during summer road trips with her teacher parents before she was a teen. San Francisco native Lucie Faulknor found the library a refuge from the chaos of a house shared with six older siblings. Both women loved libraries but didn’t know the history.
Want to defend democracy? Start with your public library.
The public library’s founding principle is breathtaking: Build a place where anyone can enter, free of charge, and encounter a universe of ideas. Today, that principle is under assault. FREE FOR ALL serves as an urgent call to save public libraries from ongoing efforts to limit their programming, censor their books, cut taxes that support them, and, in some cases, shut their doors permanently.
Co-directed by Dawn (also producer, editor, and narrator) and Lucie (producer and co-director), FREE FOR ALL is a persuasive, clear-eyed love letter to the public library system. With one of America’s most beloved institutions in the “center of the storm politically,” Dawn and Lucie are on a mission to spark a national dialogue about the future of our public libraries.
The film was nationally broadcast as part of the PBS Independent Lens series at the end of April and is available to PBS members through PBS Passport, a membership benefit when one contributes a gift of $5 per month or an annual gift of $60 or more. That donation will help KQED continue to serve our community through media that educates, inspires, and entertains.
The Independent Television Service, which presents Independent Lens, offered a shorter version of FREE FOR ALL to screen in libraries and community centers. “They were expecting 30 to 40 screening requests,” Lucie enthuses, “and FREE FOR ALL blew that out of the water with more than 500 requests.”
The filmmakers are continuing community screening events, a unifier for library lovers across the country. Peter Host, Alaska Public Media’s Director of Development, is one of many in small communities that hosts the film, saying, “I would love to urge people to not take services like this for granted just because in their lifetime, it’s always been there.”
“My hope is that Free for All can help to bridge political divides, as libraries are important to a vast majority of people,” Dawn explains. She hopes the film connects with librarians, people of all ages and political identities, and those who have drifted away from libraries. “We want to preach to the choir because we need them to lift their voices up, but we want to go beyond the choir as well to possibly get new members,” Lucie agrees. “Not to say I’m a recruiter or anything, but I feel like it’s important for people to see these public libraries as our spaces. We pay for them. We have paid for them for the last 150 years.”
The film sets out as a nostalgic memoir.
Dawn’s narration opens the film, explaining why and how, as a child, her parents took her on road trips across the U.S.—always stopping at local libraries along the way. Cut to the filmmakers’ present journeys around the country to libraries large and small, grandiose and humble, thriving and imperiled. And at each stop, a focus on individual libraries, librarians, and everyday patrons.
In juxtaposing two revolutionary moments: the original “Library Movement” that swept the country in the late 19th century and the current 21st century struggle to keep public libraries flourishing and relevant in the digital age, we learn how those facilities bring people together in ways that few other places seem to do anymore, revealing our libraries as a precious legacy to each generation, offering the heritage of the past and the promise of the future.
Viewing never-before-seen archival imagery, animation, and a visually stunning mosaic of stories, we rediscover the lost voices of generations of impassioned library pioneers—especially women–who helped forge the public library’s starring role in our democracy.
Free For All, in essence, is a continuation of Dawn’s journey. For over a decade, she and Lucie have been recording what happens at public libraries and noticing along the way how they have gone, “from being America’s most trusted and least controversial institution to a battle ground in the growing culture wars.”
Why? It’s the sort of question you could turn to the books in a library to answer. The documentary presents a compelling story of public libraries then and now, warts and all.
Lucie and Dawn squeezed a lot into the film’s 84 minutes. Sure, many know Benjamin Franklin founded the first lending library in the United States, but how many know Lutie Stearns? A librarian, she traveled by sleigh to bring books to readers in remote, snowy Wisconsin.
“Learning from history, it was amazing to find out that it was basically women all over the country who championed libraries,” Lucie says. “The way they would go out on horseback to deliver books in the middle of nowhere was fascinating.”
One woman given a lot of airtime and due credit is Ernestine Rose, who arrived in New York City in 1904 as a newly-trained librarian. The city and its inhabitants thrilled her—but also made her wonder how she could best serve such a diverse, and largely illiterate, immigrant population. This is just one of the stories. FREE FOR ALL tells many, many more.
Stranded and saved by library “first responders”
The idea for Free for All was born in 2005 when Dawn and Lucie were stranded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, due to Hurricane Katrina. They had been finishing their previous film, The Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans and were scrambling to find a way to call their families. The Baton Rouge Public Library was a gathering place where people could access the internet, get a helping hand, and sign up for Red Cross aid and FEMA loans.
“It was just amazing,” Lucie recalls. “They’re first responders. I had no idea librarians were first responders.” The 2008 financial crisis added urgency when libraries across the country were closing. Lucie said she told Dawn, “We have to do something.” “When we started this project, we didn’t grasp the urgency fully,” Dawn adds, “and neither did people that we went to for funding. It is urgent now.”
Do you remember the first time you stepped inside a library?
Originally focusing their film on a day in San Francisco’s Main Library, Dawn and Lucie discovered that “The San Francisco library system is one of the best systems in the world right now and the
most innovative in the country.” The Friends of San Francisco Library fought for decades to ensure stable library funding and asked voters to create the Library Preservation Fund (LPF) in 1994. The LPF has resulted in a 174% increase in the San Francisco Public Library’s budget and powered its evolution into a nationally recognized urban public library.
The filmmakers soon learned, however, that while San Francisco’s library system was well funded, small-town libraries were facing great threats—“Everybody was telling us that libraries were obsolete and weren’t needed anymore and that the paper book was on its way out.”
In the film, viewers see a sign displayed at the Myrtle Creek branch library, informing patrons that the last open day will be March 30, 2017. As local news outlets reported in 2019, following the closures, library lovers in the region “have fought, wrangled and inspired to launch a grass-roots effort to help re-open the doors. Small but growing armies of volunteers have worked to rebuild collection catalogs, staff reference desks, and run summer reading programs for kids.”
“Nine of the 11 closed libraries are now back up and running in a rural DIY fashion,” The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. “Roseburg, home to what was once the county’s largest library, will begin checking out books and providing free internet access this fall.”
A Pivot in the Film, A Focus for the Future
“Right before the pandemic lockdown, we thought we had finished the film,” Dawn remembers, “and because all the libraries were closed, we had a delay in getting our high-resolution archival images.” (The film includes more than 700 archival clips and photos, including at least one visual from every state.) During that delay, the filmmakers decided to start shooting and editing again to cover what was happening to public spaces during the pandemic and then what started happening to them afterward.
“Did you know that in San Francisco, librarians were repurposed during the COVID pandemic?” Lucie asks. “They didn’t lay them off. The city repurposed them and had a lot of them doing contact tracing.”
Dawn recalls that “One of our characters, Elizabeth, a librarian in Seymour Wisconsin, is so passionate and so loving towards all her little kids. She was trying to navigate getting storytime online. And she started crying. That was really moving to me. She wasn’t crying because of censorship or anything. It was just that she missed her kids and wanted to find a way to help everybody from feeling really isolated.”
“That’s also when a focus on our endangered public commons really came to the fore as censorship and book-banning gained steam,” Lucie remembers. “We saw that some Proud Boys went into the San Lorenzo Public Library in 2022 when there was a drag queen story hour, terrorizing these poor little kids who just wanted to hear a little story with somebody in a costume, you know, who happened to be dressed like a woman. I mean, that was pretty scary for a lot of people.”
The film shows heated demonstrations, with community members calling for books dealing with themes such as LGBTQ+ issues to be pulled from the shelves, as librarians make the case that their role is to provide information, not to act as parents.
“Public libraries have a complicated history with many dark chapters that we didn’t want to whitewash over,” Dawn emphasizes. “All the things that trouble our nation are in this story and, in many ways, the challenges of the past are repeating. Yet the history of public libraries is also one of the great American stories. It’s brimming with patriotism and hope and useful lessons for today on how to build a movement for change.”
Despite the headline-generating topics, FREE FOR ALL ends on a positive note, pointing out that, just as pioneers from decades ago worked to shape the public library, efforts continue to create libraries that will meet the needs of those who use them today, underscoring the fact that these institutions are crucial for a healthy, democratic society.
A line in the film’s narration says it all: “In most books, there’s a hero of the story. But in the story of the public library itself, there isn’t one hero—There’s a valiant movement with thousands of unsung heroes fighting to create and keep American libraries FREE FOR ALL.”
