Slay the Dragon(2019)
dir. Barak Goodman & Chris Durrance
Ordinary people vs. the people who draw the map.
Where to watch: Free with ads on YouTube; rent on Apple TV, AmazonLetterboxd ↗
Katie Fahey founds Voters Not Politicians, a volunteer campaign to take map-drawing power away from Michigan's legislators. The film follows that fight and sets it inside the bigger story of how partisan gerrymandering works, with redistricting experts like Stephen Wolf and David Daley explaining the mechanics. It's a procedural about a procedure most people were told to ignore.
Why it’s here
Most people treat district maps as weather: something that happens to you. This film shows ordinary people deciding they're allowed to touch them. What's punk is the audacity of a volunteer campaign aimed at the people who write their own job security. What's pedagogical is that it makes the mechanics legible, who draws the lines, why it matters and what a fix looks like, then shows a fix being fought for. Note: the fight in the film is mainly over partisan gerrymandering, and it predates the 2026 Voting Rights Act ruling, so it won't cover what has changed since.
Where This Film Lives
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