EXCLUSIVE: Jane Elliott Against the World, the Oscar-contending documentary about the Iowa educator who opened the eyes of Americans to the pernicious mechanism of racism, will soon reach theaters.
Judd Ehrlich’s film, winner of the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Bentonville Film Festival, opens December 4 at The Quad in New York City and in Los Angeles at Laemmle Noho 7. The feature, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, has won audience awards at the Boulder International Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, Sonoma International Film Festival, and Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, among other honors. It screens at DOC NYC on November 15. Jane Elliott Against the World is set to make its premiere on the PBS series Independent Lens and on streaming on March 29, 2027.
Watch an exclusive clip from the film below.
“In 1968, Jane Elliott divided her all-white Iowa classroom by eye color, creating a lesson in discrimination that made her a national icon and lightning rod in the fight against racism,” notes a synopsis. “Now, nearing 90, she takes on a new battle over censorship in schools while reckoning with the cost of a lifetime spent refusing to back down.”
The documentary is produced by Judd Ehrlich, Max Powers, and Elena Gaby. Along with Jane Elliott and members of her family, it features Killer Mike, Ibram X. Kendi, Yohuru Williams, Brianna Holt, and Dianne Cox.
Through her blue eye/brown eye exercise, Elliott found a way to expose the arbitrary nature of racial bias and how hurtful such discrimination is for people who experience it. While she began by conducting the exercise with her pupils in Iowa, she later did the exercise with adults – often triggering profound realizations among participants, and just as often provoking extremely defensive reactions.
“It is a confrontational exercise and that’s the point,” Ehrlich explained when he spoke with Deadline at Sundance. “The point is that she wants to wake people up that we don’t realize the society we’re born into. We don’t realize these beliefs that we have and we don’t realize that, as Jane says, we often ‘go along to get along’ and she wants to shake people from that.”
Ehrlich added, “One of the things she realized within the first 15 minutes of doing the exercise is how quickly — as the authority figure as the teacher — she could divide her students, how quickly they were at each other and beating each other up on the playground just because she said this group is superior to this group. So, she really understands the creep of authoritarianism and how quickly that can happen just by ‘othering’ another group. It’s another big lesson of the exercise that’s so relevant today.”
In the exclusive clip below, Elliott addresses fellow educators in Temecula, CA in the context of a fight with a conservative school board over what should and should not be taught to students.
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