In the beginning of this year, Netflix raised its prices a dollar or two, depending on your subscription tier. Amazon Prime Video became ad supported by default while increasing their ad load; watching it ad-free—to which many of us have grown accustomed—now costs an extra three bucks a month. Paramount+ increased its prices in the middle of last year, as did Peacock. Streaming our anxieties—financial and otherwise—has become an increasingly pricey affair.
Meanwhile, libraries—those stalwarts of the intellectually engaged and impecunious—have come under attack on multiple fronts: activist and government led book bans, the firing of the Librarian of Congress, an executive order to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and related draconian cost cuts. It’s all ostensibly meant to curtail federal bureaucracy, but more truthfully aimed at rooting out what the Labor Department calls “discriminatory DEI initiatives or divisive, anti-American programming.”
The streaming platform Kanopy has quietly emerged out of all of this chaos as a source of hope and even resistance against these assaults on our discretionary spending and intellectual freedom. (And will hopefully remain so—provided no one from the current administration gets around to reading this article.)
A refuge for out-of-work artists and perpetual grad students since it launched 12 years ago at such academic libraries as Harvard, Northwestern and USC, Kanopy is currently available at over 1800 prominent U.S. colleges and universities. But its collection of documentaries, independent and foreign films and television series to a world of viewers who have not clung to their .edu email address. If you have a current public library card and live in L.A., Toronto, Queens or any of the other 4000 public library systems that use the service, you already have free access to its over 30,000 titles, which run the gamut from De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves to Araki’s The Doom Generation, and everything in between.
But unlike their commercial competitors, Kanopy could never boast original content—until now. On April 25, Kanopy began streaming Banned Together, its first co-produced feature-length documentary. Directed by educator Kate Way and actor-turned-filmmaker Tom Wiggin (who’s appeared on Broadway and spent a decade as Kirk Andersen on As the World Turns), the film tells the story of a group of students in Beaufort, South Carolina who organize after 97 books are yanked from their school library through the actions of activist parents. The teens build a coalition that includes the Southern Poverty Law Center and Maryland Congressman and Trump nemesis Jamie Raskin.
“This film provides a guidebook of sorts,” Jason Tyrrell, General Manager of Kanopy, tells Observer. “It shows students the power that they have at their fingertips.” For Kanopy, which has long seen itself as a bridge between digitally inclined young people and libraries of every stripe, the film’s focus on both libraries and budding activism was not by accident. “The DNA of our passion for libraries was all over this project,” says Tyrrell. “We take our civic responsibility very seriously.”
Banned Together highlights the deep-seated irrationality of looking at books and libraries as the source of society’s ills. One student joined the group’s efforts when the county banned books about drug use—based on a concern they would encourage drug abuse—during the same week her little brother, whom she describes as never having read a book in his life, OD’d on meth.
“We really wanted audiences of Kanopy to understand what was going on, but then we also wanted to get behind something that, for young people, could really be a clarion call,” says Tyrrell. “For us, what was exciting about the story was not just that it was shining light on an insidious and what I would call anti-American issue, but it was also centered on high school students and their path to becoming student activists.”
Kanopy’s entrée into documentary financing comes at a precarious time for documentary funding and distribution. Whereas just a few years ago many were proclaiming a golden era of documentaries, mainstream commercial streamers like Amazon and Netflix have now largely retrenched, leaving well-regarded films without distribution and, with the Trump administration’s cancellation of grants by the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities, with limited funding opportunities.
The current documentary film scene can be summed up in a snapshot: Amazon reportedly paid $40 million to license Brett Ratner’s forthcoming Melania Trump film, the Tower Heist director’s first foray into documentary, while veteran filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing were forced to self-distribute Union, a vital accounting of Amazon Labor Union’s efforts to unionize the online retailer’s warehouses.
Says Tyrrell, “If you want to tell a story that doesn’t have an A-lister as star or executive producer, if you want to tell a story that is deeply researched or about a corner of society that doesn’t get the spotlight, it is less and less frequent that you find those opportunities for financing or distribution here in the States. We felt like this was a critical moment to provide documentary cinema another outlet and another path to sustainability.”
Tyrell believes that for things to improve, it’s going to come from solidarity and collaboration across the independent financing and distribution space, something almost unimaginable in a commercial streaming landscape where exclusivity is the coin of the realm.
“There are a lot of different avenues to have a piece of business around a film,” says Tyrell. “Although we are a partial financier and executive producer on Banned Together, we did not hold the film hostage to exclusivity on Kanopy. It’s been made available in other transactional spaces, including educationally. If we are to get behind something, it’s not about exclusivity: we want it to have the widest possible impact outside of our bounds. It’s going to take the independent community finding ways to collaborate and be as selfless as possible for things to get better.”
While Kanopy’s model might point a way forward out of the valley of documentary filmmaking’s shadow of death, can it really satisfy the media insatiability of a forthcoming wave of recession-weary stream cutters?
Yes, but only if we all alter the way we think about streaming—away from the content superstore metaphor and towards the surprisingly large indie video store in the manner of New York’s beloved Kim’s Video. (The eponymously named 2023 documentary about the Manhattan mainstay is available for streaming on Kanopy.)
Kanopy has no algorithm with which to game you: its featured films and series are curated by a programming team focused on, as Tyrell puts it, “surprise and delight.” The catalog for public libraries is now at more than 30,000 titles and they add over 100 titles a week, but few buzzed about TV shows or blockbusters. (One curious exception: last year’s gore fest Longlegs; Osgood Perkins’ hit horror thriller is among the many recent releases on Kanopy as a result of the platform’s partnerships with indie disturbers, including Neon, IFC and Kino Lorber.)
“We might not have the big new releases that the other streaming services rely on and that take up a lot of the oxygen in the room in media,” explains Tyrell. “But what we do have is this incredibly deep and broad catalog that people can get lost in.”
