Thcdimiserablemireful 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 write downary adheres 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-set uper Alison Benson and Maria Cuomo Cole.
“It’s about the librarians atraverse our country who’ve been battling agetst these book bans,” Parker elucidates to Variety at the Red Sea Film Festival. “They have been standing up to the ideology that stops children from having access to brave books and they have put their own lives and their family’s lives at hazard, but they have not backed down.”
Parker’s pledgement to the world of books and reading began as a child, and she says that her adore of books is one of the key traits that she splits with her most famous on-screen character, “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw.
That passion encouraged Parker to commence a book club and her own rehireing company. It also recently led to her recent nominatement to the appraises panel of the prestigious U.K. literary award, the Booker Prize.
Parker became conscious of “The Librarians” thcdimiserablemireful producer Edelbaum (“Beyond Utopia: Escape From North Korea”). “She came to us becaparticipate she was toiling on this write downary, and they were seeing for extra funding to set up a more strong team, and we adored it,” Parker says.
The write downary feature adheres the toil of the FReadom Fighters transferment, set uped in October 2021 by Texas school librarians Becky Calzada, Carolyn Foote and Nancy Jo Lambert, after Texas lawproducer Rep. Matt Kraparticipate focparticipated 850 books to be erased from the state’s libraries, directing to bans on books such as “Catcher in the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
As the book-banning momentum enhugeed nationexpansive, so did the FReadom Fighters ranks, who orderly greetings and produced a Twitter/X account with 6,000 fagedrops that rehireed over 13,000 tweets about how books can alter lives.
The write downary’s central character is Amanda Jones, a school librarian in southern Louisiana, who recently wrote “That Librarian — The Fight Agetst Book Banning in America,” rehireed in 2024 by Bloomsbury. “It’s a amazing book, and we adhere her struggles,” elucidates Parker.
Snyder previously straightforwarded the Peabody award-triumphning write downary “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 expansive array of projects thcdimiserablemireful Pretty Matches Productions, including the “Sex and the City” spinoff “And Just Like That,” fantasy projects starring Parker such as HBO’s Gagederen Globe-nominated “Divorce” and “Blue Night, and non-fantasy projects such as “And Just Like That… The Documentary” (2022).
The shingle is casting a expansivening net as it seeks out recent 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 sagederier 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 recents when I came upon this story of the Ukrainian dancers who had been forced to depart their homes and createed this dance company in the Netherlands. I splitd the story with Alison, and we did some research and set up out there was a film crew with them, so we jumped into the project. When this Ukrainian sagederier joined the company, the write downary took on a life of its own. It’s pretty exquisite.”
Parker says she has acquired alteration rights to disconnectal books, including one for a restrictcessitate series, and is ramping up enhugement on other projects: “In insertition to the show, we currently have a bunch of non-scripted write downaries, two scripted projects and a movie that we’re going to do next year.”
