Won't You Be My Neighbor?

A documentary about Fred Rogers. From 1968 onwards Rogers made a children's programme for more than thirty years. Its form was extremely slow by the measure of children's television today: a man looking into the camera and talking, leaving silences, working puppets and addressing children directly. What the documentary shows is that this was not a stylistic preference but a deliberate method. Rogers had trained in theology and studied child development; every decision on the programme, including the length of his sentences, rested on that. The subjects it took on were unusual too: death, divorce, war, racial segregation. One of the most cited passages is the scene, in a period when segregation continued, of Rogers cooling his feet in the same basin as a Black performer. Another is Rogers's testimony to the Senate when public broadcasting funding was about to be cut; in six minutes the decision changes. Morgan Neville directed. A sincere production for anyone who likes documentary and cultural history. For a viewer expecting a critical portrait, the film approaches its subject largely with affection and does not go far into contested ground.