When director Kate Way, a current UMass Lowell assistant professor and former Northampton High School teacher, had just finished teaching a course on book banning in the fall of 2022, the very subject she was teaching became, to her surprise, the focus of a new feature-length documentary.

That winter, Way was visiting South Carolina when she noticed a controversy brewing: Three local high school students were taking a stand against the removal of nearly 100 books from their school. She started documenting the conflict, expecting it’d just become a short movie.

A few months into the process, however, a production company in Charleston reached out about a possible collaboration, and the project turned into a 90-minute documentary, “Banned Together,” which was released on Oct. 2. Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in Florence will host a screening of the movie on Friday, Nov. 8, at 7 p.m.

Many of the most-banned or most-challenged books in the United States in recent years are those with BIPOC or LGBTQ authors or themes, which presents a certain danger, Way said.

“We lose the ability for a diverse range of people to see themselves and their experiences reflected in stories; we lose the ability for readers to learn about others who are different or have different experiences form their own; we lose the ability for people to develop an informed sense of the world in all its complexity and diversity and how they want to navigate that world,” she wrote in an email.

Of course, the issue of book banning isn’t just limited to parents (or groups of parents) going to their own children’s school libraries to demand certain books be removed — it’s now, in many places, a legal matter that has seen debates at the school board level and higher. Being legally forbidden from writing a book would, in most cases, be an obvious First Amendment violation, of course, but is it a First Amendment violation to be banned from reading one?

“Absolutely,” Way said.

“The First Amendment is most broadly about both being able to communicate and receive information freely,” she said. “By banning books, we’re taking away people’s ability to take in information, which is also very much a part of the First Amendment right.”

A book ban, in this context, refers to banning a book that would likely otherwise be age-appropriate from a school library or classroom; it doesn’t include, for example, banning George Orwell’s “1984” — Way’s favorite banned book — from kindergartners. To Way, the process for screening books doesn’t need to be codified into law because librarians are already thoroughly trained to screen books on their own — legal challenges to their work “deprofessionalize” them.

“Trust librarians and trust the training that they’ve gone through and trust that they are using age-appropriate materials,” Way said.

Way isn’t expecting much community pushback at the screening, though she pointed out that western Massachusetts isn’t exempt from book bans and challenges. Last December, police visited a Great Barrington school after a night custodian reported pages from the book “Gender Queer,” which he claimed to have seen in an eighth grade classroom.

The book was No. 1 on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 list; No. 5 on the list, “Flamer,” a graphic novel about a gay teenager at a summer camp, was written by Mike Curato, who lives in Northampton. Statewide, according to the ALA, there were 37 ”attempts to restrict access to books” for 63 works in 2023.

About a week before the Bombyx screening, Way met up with Julia Garnett, an anti-book-ban activist and Smith College student who makes a brief appearance in “Banned Together,” at Woodstar Cafe in Northampton. As it happened, Garnett was about to head off to South Carolina for another screening of the film.

Garnett, who comes from Hendersonville, Tennessee and identifies as queer, said she got into the fight against book bans when her school board debated a challenge to Zetta Elliott’s Caldecott Honor book “A Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart,” which is about a Black boy processing a police shooting in his neighborhood.

Garnett went to a school board meeting about the book to make a speech in support of it, though doing so made her nervous. In doing so, however, “I really found this amazing community of people who really rallied and supported me and my voice as a queer student to continue to defend challenged books. And I really found a space, activism-wise, to continue to use my voice for change.”

Since then, she’s racked up plenty of recognition and accolades for her work; last October, first lady Jill Biden recognized her as part of a collection of ”Girls Leading Change” as part of the International Day of the Girl. Earlier this year, the ALA named her the 2024 Youth Honorary Chair of National Banned Books Week.

Currently, as a student at Smith, she’s taking a class about the history of book banning, which helps to further contextualize her activism.

“To be able to connect it and root it in history has been so helpful,” she said. “I’ve already used so much of what I’ve learned, because the arguments [for book banning] do not change.”

Despite all the challenges of book bans, the movie ends on a high note, Way said: “The focus is as much about our hope, based on what we’re seeing in young people who are standing up against this, as it is about the lack of hope and what we’re seeing from a lot of the people putting these challenges forward.”

Garnett agreed.

“We’re not gonna win every battle in the fight against book bans. I surely did not, and there have been many books that have disappeared out of my high school library,” she said. Still, what keeps her motivated is “just knowing that everything that you do — even if it’s just a small action, [like] writing your school board, writing about what’s happening — that is enough.”

Tickets are available at bombyx.ludus.com for a $10 suggested donation.