Karen Ranucci spent decades thinking about this film.
“For 20 years, I’ve been wanting to make this documentary,” said Ranucci, an Olive resident who produced “Steal This Story, Please!,” a 2025 film about Amy Goodman and the rise of “Democracy Now!”
The project is arriving close to home. Upstate Films is showing the documentary April 22 at Starr Cinema in Rhinebeck, followed by a discussion with Ranucci, an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and videographer who later worked for more than a decade at “Democracy Now!,” helping expand the program from radio to a simultaneous television and internet broadcast. A full run there starts April 24, the same day it is set to play at Time and Space Limited in Hudson. The Rosendale Theatre run starts May 8.
Directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, the documentary traces Goodman’s reporting career and the growth of “Democracy Now!,” the daily independent, nonprofit news program founded in 1996 as an alternative to corporate media. The film’s official synopsis describes it as a portrait of a journalist whose work has brought viewers from war zones and protest movements.
For Ranucci, the documentary is more than a biography. It is also a response to years of attacks on journalism and the consolidation of local and family-owned outlets into larger media companies.
“We understood the danger of that and why independent media was so important and that the time to make this documentary was now,” she said.
Goodman said in an interview that she did not initially welcome being the centerpiece of a film.
“Allowing two stalkers into my life was not the most comfortable proposition,” she joked. “But promoting independent media was.”
That mission gives the documentary its charge. Press freedom is under pressure, and corporate ownership has narrowed the range of voices in public life, she said.
“The media should be a sanctuary of dissent,” Goodman said.
The answer, she said, is more journalism that is independent from government and corporate power. Democracy Now! does not accept donations from either group.
“The media is like a frame,” she said. “We broaden that frame to bring the voices that are marginalized, and often erased, not only into the frame, but we center those voices.”
That idea runs through the documentary and through the way Goodman describes her work. She returns again and again to the people most affected by public policy, war, and inequality — the people who are usually quoted too little, if at all.
“Our job is to go to where the silence is,” Goodman said. “And, you know, it’s often not silent there. It’s often raucous. Rowdy people are organizing, but it doesn’t hit the corporate media radar screen.”
Ranucci said the film’s release strategy mirrors the values it argues for. Rather than relying on a major corporate distributor, the team has built a theatrical run through independent channels and plans to expand into community screenings at universities, houses of worship, and union halls. It premiered last June at the DC/DOX Film Festival in Washington, D.C.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.