Pygmalion Festival: "Steal This Story, Please" Screening and Q&A

• Event Date: Friday, September 25, 2026
• Time: 6:30 pm–8:30 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Tickets required: $10+ fees in advance and $15 at the door

• Film

Steal This Story, Please!

• Documentary
• USA
• 2025
• 98 Minutes

Screening and Q&A with co-director Carl Dean after the film. Tickets required: $10+ fees in advance and $15 at the door.

Purchase tickets (external)

About the Movie

With shrinking newsrooms, media monopolization, weaponized social media, and a president deliberately eroding public trust in truth and reality, Steal This Story, Please! offers an intimate counterpoint, showing how independent media is essential to a functioning democracy. Set against some of the most consequential stories of our time—from the war in Gaza to the global climate catastrophe—the film follows the intrepid independent journalist Amy Goodman over 30 years. As she becomes a leader in the movement for independent media that amplifies voices excluded from the mainstream, she faces off against forces trying to silence her.

The film takes us behind the scenes, from Amy’s upbringing as the wisecracking granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi to the front lines of global conflicts. Amy and her team at Democracy Now! have built a grassroots news broadcast that brings fresh perspectives to the airwaves, proving that in an increasingly profit-driven, consolidated media landscape, independent reporting might just be the thing that saves us.

• Directors: Carl Deal, Tia Lessin
• Producers: Karen Ranucci, Tia Lessin, Carl Deal, Diana Cohn, Caren Spruch
• Executive Producers: Dominique Bravo, Julie Cohen, Rosario Dawson, Tom Morello, Tony Tabatznik
• Cinematographers: Cliff Charles, Nausheen Dadabhoy, Keith Walker
• Editor: Mona Davis
• Cast: Amy Goodman

About Carl Dean

This screening will be followed by a Zoom Q&A with co-director Carl Deal. Born and raised in Urbana, IL, Carl founded Elsewhere Films in 2007 with his wife and filmmaking partner, Tia Lessin, with the goal of creating documentary films of cultural relevance, social purpose, and artistic integrity.

Together, they directed and produced the acclaimed Trouble the Water, a film about survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won the Gotham Independent Film Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The African-American Film Critics Association and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists named it the Best Documentary of 2008, and it finished second for the National Film Critics Circle Award. It also appeared on both the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly lists of the best films of the year.

In 2013, Carl and Tia produced and directed Citizen Koch, which explores the influence of money in U.S. politics, with a particular focus on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and the rise of both the Tea Party and Occupy movements.

Carl went on to produce two films by Michael Moore: 2015's Where to Invade Next and 2018's Fahrenheit 11/9. He previously served as a co-producer on Moore's 2009 film Capitalism: A Love Story and 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remains the highest-grossing documentary of all time in the United States and the third-highest-grossing documentary worldwide.

Carl's most recent film, Steal This Story, Please!, has screened around the world to sold-out crowds and packed theaters, earning Audience Awards at film festivals and becoming one of the year's highest-grossing documentaries.