Nov. 13, 2025 - Epoch Times
02:19
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| They'll bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly from them. | |
| And the film was shot almost immediately following the closures. | |
| We started in 2022. | |
| So the pain was still extremely raw when we started filming. | |
| We just got in a car. | |
| Stephanie Edmonds, who is my friend and was a teacher who lost her job in the New York City public schools due to the vaccine mandates, she refused to comply. | |
| The union didn't fight for her and they fired her instead. | |
| So she was available. | |
| She was a single mom. | |
| I met her at a rally and I thought, hey, let's make this film. | |
| And she was totally up for it. | |
| So we got on the road and just started rolling. | |
| I mean, it was, we did everything wrong. | |
| I can't believe this film is even done or out or you can see it. | |
| So I think for me, that's a huge triumph to be fair. | |
| We did bring in an incredible producer in Eli Steele, who is a very gifted storyteller and filmmaker. | |
| And he advised us every step of the way. | |
| And then we have Hawk Jensen, who's a veteran filmmaker as well, who came on board about a year and a half ago to help with the massive, massive editing process. | |
| So this film, in many ways, has been made in post-production. | |
| I will also point out that we did almost 60 interviews over three years. | |
| So there's no way you can feature 60 interviews in a film that's one hour and nine minutes long. | |
| These are just the stories that we could fit in here. | |
| There are many, many more stories that I hope to at some point edit and release so that people hear them. | |
| And it was inspired very much by Steven Spielberg and what he did during the show up, the founding of the Showa Foundation, because I remember reading the story of how important it was to him to preserve the Holocaust survivors' stories while they were still alive because it was primary material. | |
| Once they were gone, it was gone. | |
| And of course, this wasn't a Holocaust, but it was a hugely avoidable tragedy for children and families in this country. | |
| And I just felt like, well, we better get those stories in now because people aren't going to want to talk about them in a couple of years. | |
| And it's true, even now, as we show the film, I see people, I watch their body language, and they shudder. | |
| It takes them back to a very, very dark time. |
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