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I love this movie so much, it’s a struggle to write about it coherently. The many thoughts it provokes are stumbling over each other between my head and my keyboard. What’s the best way to convince you that you should see 9500 Liberty? (You can significant chunks of it on the 9500 Liberty YouTube channel, so it’s easy to access.)

9500 Liberty takes its title from a street address where a community resident posts signs about his reaction to a discriminatory community ordinance in Manassas, Virginia. (The contentious law is very much like the Arizona one you’ve been hearing about.) Filmmakers Eric Byler and Annabel Park — whose film had its genesis as a series of YouTube videos — documented their concern about the divisive issue’s effect on their community.

I wish every US citizen could and would see this movie. It has at least two important messages — the first is about the discriminatory law and its impact on the community, but the second is much broader — it’s about the need for re-introducing civility to public discourse. 9500 Liberty succeeds not only in informing its audience about the issue, but also is an artistic success. It’s very solidly constructed and paced, perhaps surprisingly so for a work that had it’s genesis in snippets posted in near real-time. Byler and Park are gifted filmmakers and interviewers. One of the many striking things about this film is that they don’t just seek out the voices that agree with their opinions; they have shockingly candid conversations with private citizens and elected officials on both sides of the issues.

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