All In: The Fight for Democracy
Review by Myla Tosatto
Sometimes documentaries are feel good works of art like Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and sometimes they teach us valuable lessons like How to Survive a Plague and some documentaries anger us to action like Blackfish. All In: The Fight for Democracy artfully does all three. The movie by Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbus will lift you up, educate, and make you clamber to be a campaign or poll worker.
All In: The Fight for Democracy is an uncomfortable look at America’s voter suppression tactics starting with the framing of our Constitution (only white land owning men were eligible to vote) to the current State of Florida imposing a poll tax on former incarcerated people. In between the movie digs deep into gerrymandering, the Civil Rights Act, the Suffragette movement, voter purging, voter intimidation, government I.D. requirements, and poll closures.
Lending their voices to the documentary are Stacey Abrams (former Democratic nominee for Georgia governor), Eric Holder (former Attorney General of the United States), Carol Anderson (academic), and Desmond Meade (voting rights activist). Many others are interviewed with personal and professional tales of voter suppression.
All In: The Fight for Democracy is a one hour and 40-minute lesson that all Americans should watch. If anything, it will prepare you for that little election we have coming up in just a few short weeks (perhaps you’ve heard of it?). It might make the viewer realize that democracy is fragile and that we should do everything in our power to fight for it.
While you are schooling your kids from home, turn on Amazon Prime and view this documentary together. Trust Movie Myla when I say, it will open your eyes and start a nice healthy discussion on why some people don’t want others to vote, who holds the power in America, and what are some possible solutions to help with these dilemmas.
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