Director DAWN PORTER (US 2022) 100 min
Acclaimed director Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble, DocLands 2020; DocLands Honors recipient 2023) is known for how deftly she humanizes legends, and demonstrates here how well history and the most personal thoughts and actions shaping it can be conveyed through archival records. Porter fashions her film from 123 hours of Lady Bird Johnson’s personal and revealing audio diary, which she began in 1963, when the assassination of President Kennedy obliged her husband Lyndon B. Johnson to take on the “most challenging and demanding job on Earth” as the 36th President of the United States, and continued recording through the Johnsons’ final day in the White House in 1969. Though Lady Bird found it distasteful to be called “First Lady,” she used the title to prove herself a savvy political strategist and propel her conservationist ideas into action, preserving natural resources for the American people.