So, I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
There’s a particular feeling I keep circling back to. I don’t know exactly what to call it, but the closest phrase I have is Utopian Scholastic. That warm, safe, slightly idealised 1990s world of book fairs, classroom carpets, library cards, autumn leaves, laminated posters, little local places, and adults who still believed children deserved wonder. I miss that world.
Or maybe I miss the version of the world I felt inside it. A world where a small library could feel like the centre of the universe. Where a book wasn’t just content. It was a doorway. Where a neighbourhood wasn’t anonymous yet. Where people still bumped into each other, talked, remembered names, and cared about things that didn’t scale.
So I started imagining a film.
Library of Us.
A little two-storey library on an old street. Beloved, slightly worn, warm at night, glowing in autumn. The kind of place that has seen generations pass through its doors. Then the city decides it’s no longer useful. The land is too valuable. The future is coming. Development, budgets, screens, efficiency. All the usual words.
And suddenly, people who would normally never speak to each other are brought together.
An elderly woman who has carried the library in her heart for decades. Two kids who see it as a clubhouse, a refuge, a kingdom. A jaded author who has forgotten why stories meant anything to him. A widowed executive who knows how the world works, but has forgotten what it’s for. A successful butcher across the street who knows every neighbour by name and understands that a street is only alive if people still belong to it.
It would be sentimental. Completely. Earnestly. No irony shield.
A film about people trying to save a library, but really trying to save the part of themselves that still believes in community, memory, books, kindness, and ordinary places.
I think I’m drawn to it because I feel sad about what vanished. The softness. The slowness. The human scale. That old feeling that the future would be bright, but still gentle.
So maybe this is my tribute to that feeling.
A little autumn movie that says: some places are more than buildings. Some stories are more than stories. And sometimes, when the world gets too loud, the most radical thing you can do is keep the lights on in a small library.
