Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures
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When my documentary “15 Days” came out, I expected pushback. The film showed how American schools stayed closed long past the point at which honest people could defend the closures.
What I got was stranger. People asked me what to do.
Strangers in airports, parents at screenings, people who had never sat through a school board meeting in their lives — they wanted a plan. They wanted to know their part.
My second film, “Uncancellable,” is my answer.
The film is about Maud Maron. If you do not live in Manhattan, you may not know the name. You should.
Maud is a mother of four who has spent the last six years being told to sit down and shut up by every institution she belonged to. She has not sat down. She has not shut up. She keeps losing seats and titles, and somehow she keeps winning the argument.
Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.
The argument is whether Americans are still allowed to think for themselves in public.
Maud was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for more than 20 years. She started an advocacy group called PLACE NYC that defends screened schools and gifted programs in a city quietly dismantling both. She was elected to her community education council in District 2.
Then came the summer of 2020. Every progressive workplace in America held the same struggle session.
On a Zoom school board meeting that summer, a white board member sat with his friend’s black baby on his lap while making the case for keeping merit-based admissions at New York’s specialized high schools. Activists called him a racist. Letters circulated. Signatures were demanded.
Maud shrugged it off. She would not engage in identity politics, and she would not step down from her school board seat. For that, the lawyers at the Legal Aid Society called her a racist too. She was pushed out of her job.
She did not go quietly. She sued them.
In 2024, Maud introduced Resolution 248, which asked the council to examine the question of boys competing in girls’ sports and to put girls themselves in the room where the decision was being made. The council passed it. Activists followed her around. Council members who privately agreed with her said nothing in public.
Noam Galai/Getty Images
In 2025, the resolution was rescinded. Maud lost her school board seat in the next election. The activists declared victory.
Here is what they missed: Maud kept talking.
She is slowly winning in the culture the fight she lost in the room. A growing number of parents now say in public what almost nobody would say in 2020. That is partly because of Maud and people like her, who took the first hits so the rest of us would not have to.
In the film, Maud describes people coming up to her and saying she has the courage to say what they cannot. She turns the question around.
Why can’t they?
It is a fair question. Every parent who has watched a school curriculum get rewritten without input has felt this. Every employee who has rewritten the same Slack message four times to avoid setting off a colleague looking to be offended has felt it.
We are afraid. That fear is the whole problem.
This is what I keep telling people who ask me what to do: You do not need a national platform. You need a local one.
The school board meets this month. The PTA needs a treasurer. The neighborhood listserv has a thread about a new library policy. Your sister-in-law is about to pull her child out of public school and is too embarrassed to say why. Your son’s teacher used a phrase at parent night that made you uncomfortable, and you said nothing.
Start there. Speak up at the kitchen table first. Then at the school. Most of the people in your life are probably waiting for somebody to go first. You can be that person.
People love to say one person cannot change a country. One person cannot. A million ones can. That is what a force multiplier is.
Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures
It is also why every authoritarian system in history has worked so hard to make the first person who speaks pay the highest price. If you can scare the first one quiet, the second one never opens her mouth.
I come from the Soviet Union. I know how that works.
“15 Days” and “Uncancellable” may look like different films, but they ask the same question: Are you willing to be the first one to say the true thing?
Both are stories about free speech and ordinary people who refused to stay quiet when their professions and neighbors wanted silence. The cost of speaking up is real. The cost of staying silent is worse.
Some people will tell you the country is too far gone for one Tuesday-night school board meeting to matter. They are wrong, and they are mostly the people who do not want you to show up.
Show up anyway. Bring a friend.
Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.
It starts with the small, unglamorous habit of saying what you actually think, in the room you are actually in, to the people who are there with you.
That is the force multiplier. That is the whole revolution.
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