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Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Angelo Muredda The picaresque life of Democracy Now! founder and host Amy Goodman gets the Forrest Gump treatment in Steal This Story, Please!, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s polished and accessible documentary profiling the firebrand–still one of the most trusted sources in leftist media–over the course of a nearly forty-year career. By embracing that montage-heavy, stone-skipping approach to a life on the front lines of direct action, they sometimes skirt a deeper exploration of the stories that have animated Goodman’s career. At the same time, the film positions her dogged independent journalism as the conscience of an often conscienceless country while successfully articulating her ethos that “We will not be silent” is the Hippocratic Oath of the press, whose reporting should be a form of public service that supersedes toadying and sucking up to power.
The filmmakers’ hopeful, slick package, which opens in the midst of Goodman breathlessly chasing down a slimy Trump administration climate advisor at a Polish convention on the environment in 2018 and closes with her coverage of the Jewish Voice for Peace sit-in that shut down Grand Central Station in late October 2023 (featuring an interview with then-Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani), is populist enough to have earned several mid-film bouts of applause from a receptive audience at its second public Hot Docs screening. That’s despite placing its subject at the scene of some of the thorniest political developments since the first Bush administration. The film spans Goodman’s energetic but unsuccessful efforts to secure a producing gig on the Phil Donahue show fresh out of college in the 1980s–they finally get back to her to invite her to sit in as an audience member on an episode about the unemployed–to her media-watchdog coverage of journalists selling out their audiences by embedding with military forces in order to gain access, and, connected to that, her principled opposition to the current Israeli occupation and bombardment of Gaza. Goodman, the film shows, has been committed to capturing the perspective of those on the receiving end of bombs since her radio days, even when it has put her in various government officials’ direct line of fire.
Though Goodman’s moral clarity as a journalist is enviable, the film’s treatment of her political opponents is often flat. Deal and Lessin’s montages of people in power saying silly, untruthful things with spirited alternative rock on the soundtrack feel like shooting fish in a barrel, the irreverent, Gen-X energy derivative of their numerous collaborations with Michael Moore, for whom they produced films such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Where to Invade Next. So does the B-roll of Goodman sticking it to the Man over the years, which is meted out like catnip whenever the viewer’s morale might be low. Who could resist the mix of behind-the-scenes footage, some from Democracy Now!’s own archives and some presumably from the White House’s, when it includes highlights like then-lame duck President Bill Clinton, calling into her show on the night of the 2000 presidential election with a get-out-the-vote plea for his Vice President Al Gore but soon dragged into a debate about his Middle Eastern policy, whining about her hostile demeanour? Ultimately, though, what purpose does indulging in these slam-dunk moments serve besides making us feel better that somebody got to make Clinton feel bad?
Steal This Story, Please! is much more interesting when Deal and Lessin hone in on some of Goodman’s more singular, quixotic pursuits, like the successful lobbying effort early in her radio career to free wrongfully convicted Moreese Bickham from death row in Louisiana, or her exposé of Chevron’s funding of violent military action against Nigerian citizens who were resisting their offshore drilling operations in the 1990s. (She nets a sit-down interview with a senior executive who all but confirms he’s ordered hits on Nigerian citizens by saying she’s representing “America.”) It’s even stronger when it anchors her politics in her cultural education and beliefs, rooting her opposition to power and apartheid in her Jewish education–something she explicitly credits with her inherent questioning of authority and refusal to uncritically accept any political actions being taken in her name. That fruitful connection between the questioning of journalism and the doing of activism is at the heart of Steal This Story, Please! (whose title refers to Goodman’s democratic desire to have her work picked up and expanded upon by other outlets), which, at its best, affirms Goodman’s view–somewhat at odds with the film’s easygoing aesthetics–that reporters are not crowd-pleasers but disturbers of the peace.
