I have just watched an amazing documentary, and the first thing that came to my mind as I tried to understand and sympathize with everyone who wanted their voices heard in Speechless…was the Tower of Babel. Is it possible to hear the sound of unity in the cacophony of angry voices?
Speechless
Directed and produced by Ric Esther Bienstock and executive produced by Alex Gibney, Speechless is a two-part feature documentary that explores the theory of freedom of speech and the cultural and ideological clashes that have evolved on campuses across the world. Ric Esther Bienstock is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and accomplished investigative documentarian who was named Officer of the Order of Canada because of her commitment to raising awareness of international issues via her filmmaking.
Alex Gibney, who has earned an Academy Award, multiple Emmys, a Grammy, and a Peabody Award, has been called the most important documentarian of our time. These two great minds have given us a documentary that dissects and meticulously examines how the meaning of the term “Freedom of Speech” has evolved on select campuses, which include Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Penn State, Evergreen State College, Stanford, the University of Sussex and New College of Florida. How can we have a debate over race, gender, and social justice when we are not able to have this discussion without offending all participating parties?
As I watched the two segments, “The New Campus Revolution” and “The Pendulum,” it was shocking to see how easily the earlier goal of allowing everyone a voice on campus was later used as a weapon against those students or professors who spoke a different ideology. They were labelled transphobic or anti-Palestine. Woke was now the enemy…and the incoming political administration ran with the total abolishment of DEI. And this is when the mental picture of the Tower of Babel hit me. Are we not listening to each other because we don’t understand, or is the idea of Freedom of Speech nothing more than an unsustainable fairytale? I needed answers. I needed to chat with Ric Esther Bienstock.
Marie Gilbert: This was such an eye-opening film. I am honoured to have reviewed Speechless and to do this interview. What was the inspiration…that spark that made you choose Free Speech as the subject for this documentary?
Ric Esther Bienstock: It started personally. My kids were heading to university, and I kept seeing stories coming out of campuses that were intriguing and frightening at the same time. Professors losing careers over things they’d taught for decades. Students genuinely believing they’d been harmed by a word. And mainstream media largely looking the other way. I’ve spent my career making films about challenging stories – Ebola, trafficking, organ harvesting. This felt like the same instinct. Something real was happening inside the institutions that shape the next generation of citizens and leaders, and nobody was telling the whole story honestly. So I went back to school. What I didn’t know at the time, was that it would take nearly a decade, and that the ideas I’d first encountered at Evergreen State College in 2017 would be reshaping federal policy in the United States. I didn’t predict any of that. But I was filming the whole time.
Marie Gilbert: Do you feel that the resulting culture wars that are happening on the campuses have a bigger impact on social change as compared to what is happening on the political scene, where diversity and free speech have become ostracized?
Ric Esther Bienstock: I’d actually argue you can’t separate them, and that’s one of the things the film tries to show. What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. The ideas that were being debated in faculty meetings and DEI training sessions in 2017 were shaping institutional policy by 2020, and shaping federal policy by 2025. Universities are where the next generation of lawyers, journalists, politicians, teachers, and doctors are formed. They’re where ideas get legitimized and filtered out into the world. So when a campus decides that certain questions are too dangerous to ask, or that disagreement is a form of harm, those ideas don’t stay there. They migrate. And what the film documents is that migration, from the seminar room to the HR department to the halls of government. The culture war on campus created the conditions for the political backlash we’re now living through. You can’t understand Trump’s assault on universities without understanding what happened inside them first. That’s why we need to uphold basic principles of free expression so that no matter who is in power, those values hold.
Marie Gilbert: I kept thinking of the Tower of Babel while watching Speechless. The students, teachers and administrators were proclaiming the practice of Freedom of Speech, where supposedly everyone had a voice, but no one was listening to what the other people were saying if it went against their beliefs. How do we fix this dilemma? Do you see a light at the end of this tunnel, especially since an anti-DEI government is at the helm?
Ric Esther Bienstock: The Tower of Babel is exactly the right image. And you’ve put your finger on something the film kept circling, that what looked like passionate speech was often the opposite of communication. People were talking, loudly, but not to each other. They were performing for their own side. And the tragedy is that the machinery universities built, the safe spaces, the bias reporting systems, the mandatory trainings, was supposed to make people feel heard. Instead it made genuine conversation more dangerous. As for the light at the end of the tunnel, I want to be honest rather than falsely optimistic. The world is more polarised than at any point in my lifetime. The political backlash is real and it’s doing genuine damage – universities being defunded, researchers being deported, antisemitism being weaponized as a compliance tool. That’s not a light at the end of the tunnel. That’s a wrecking ball. But here’s what I do believe: the solution to bad speech is more speech, not less. And I see albeit slowly and tentatively, more people on all sides recognizing that the ideological rigidity of the past decade served nobody well. Whether that recognition translates into genuine reform before the wrecking ball does irreversible damage, I honestly don’t know. What I know is that the conversation has to happen. And I hope this film plays a small part in starting it.
Marie Gilbert: What is your next project?
Ric Esther Bienstock: I have a new project called HOLDOUTS and honestly, after nine years in the trenches of campus culture wars, I’m really looking forward to producing something that isn’t as filled with minefields. It’s a film about people who just won’t sell their homes, no matter what. An elderly man in England whose mother’s ashes are buried in his garden, who’s got a dead owl in his freezer that he thinks was poisoned by the developer next door. A strip club owner in Montreal who’s been holding out against a high stakes development for decades…and winning. A farmer in Sussex who turned down £275 million for his land. These are extraordinary, eccentric, utterly determined people who look a real estate developer in the eye and say: not for sale. And what I love about it is that it sounds like a quirky character piece – and it is – but it’s also really about something much bigger. Gentrification. Affordable housing. Who gets to decide what progress means and who pays the price for it. The developers aren’t villains either. Some of them are building genuinely needed housing. So the film keeps asking: who’s the hero here? And I think audiences are going to keep changing their minds. Which is exactly where I want them.
Speechless will broadcast on CBC Gem April 14th and 15th and premieres in the U.K on BBC