Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Self
Overview
The U.S. has long offered a promise of opportunity to immigrants, but currently immigration has become a divisive issue. This documentary illustrates how an understanding of our history and democracy is essential to constructive debate, informed civic participation and shaping a new class of citizens.
Cast
Reviews
4 min readThe Quiet Persuasion of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Gavel
I’ll admit it: when I first saw Out of Many, One pop up in my queue, I hesitated. A 35-minute documentary about immigration, narrated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with a TMDB score around 5.3? It sounded like the cinematic equivalent of a well-meaning but forgettable public service announcement.
But here’s the thing about documentaries—especially the short, understated ones. They don’t always arrive with the fanfare of a feature film. Sometimes they slip in quietly, like a footnote to a larger conversation, and then refuse to leave your head.
This one does exactly that.
The film’s premise is simple: it weaves together the stories of new U.S. citizens taking their oaths of allegiance, intercut with historical context about immigration’s role in shaping America. It’s the kind of material that could easily tilt into cliché—montages of huddled masses, soaring music, a voiceover about the American Dream. But Out of Many, One avoids that trap, largely because of its secret weapon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Not as a talking head or a celebrity cameo, but as a presence. Her voice—measured, deliberate, unmistakable—anchors the film, turning what could have been a generic civics lesson into something more intimate. It’s less about immigration as policy and more about the people at its center.
In 2018, when the national conversation around immigration had turned ugly and reductive, that felt like a radical act.
The film’s structure is simple, almost elegiac. We meet a handful of individuals—a Syrian refugee, a Mexican immigrant, a Nigerian doctor—each sharing fragments of their journey to citizenship. Their stories are told in brief, often wordless snippets: a hand clutching a passport, a child’s drawing of the Statue of Liberty, a family gathered around a kitchen table.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsRuth Bader Ginsburg did the oath on camera.
The short ends on a naturalization ceremony. Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg administers it. District Judge William Kuntz runs a second swearing-in, cut against hers. Common Sense Media's Renee Longstreet named both. RadicalMedia, the production company, called Ginsburg's ceremony historic. Netflix put the film up on December 12, 2018. Runtime 34 minutes. TV-PG. This is not Barack Obama's 2021 documentary of the same title. latestnetflix.com's take is that this one is John Hoffman and Nanfu Wang, shot around the New-York Historical Society's Citizenship Project.
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Film at Lincoln Center played it in the 56th New York Film Festival, September 28 to October 14, 2018. The blurb called the Citizenship Project a free class that helps green card holders prep for the USCIS Naturalization Exam. The Q&A listed Hoffman, Louise Mirrer, Allen Wernick, and Liz Robbins. RadicalMedia said the museum started the program in 2017 after federal immigration and citizenship policy shifted. The company put the U.S. green-card population near thirteen million. The film follows five of the students. ,
The civics class is the plot.
Samantha Rijkers, herself a naturalized citizen, teaches. Students study maps and historical paintings. Dipna, a Mexican mother of two adult sons, has worked in the country for 27 years, lately as a restaurant cook. Alexandra and Dagoberto came from Colombia more than 30 years earlier and cleaned Ground Zero office buildings after September 11, including asbestos jobs, before buying a house on Long Island. Jian is a Chinese computer science professor at CUNY who arrived as a graduate student 19 years earlier. Fanny Bello, a former Venezuelan government official, received political asylum after a book critical of Hugo Chavez and threats from police. Longstreet also flags that one applicant recounts threats on her life. The rest of the film, she wrote, is uplifting and family-friendly, recommended from age 11. ,
A polite film in a loud year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep4bmXjneUM
Decider's Stream It or Skip It column said Hoffman and Wang's timing did the work. Five years earlier the short might have been forgettable. In 2018, an unerringly positive look at legal immigration read to that critic as a smiling middle finger to the Trump administration. Ready Steady Cut's Daniel Hart watched the same 34 minutes and came away talking about walls and Trump voters, then admitted the film would not convert anyone already dug in. Nanfu Wang had already made Hooligan Sparrow. One Child Nation arrived in 2019 and won Best U.S. Documentary at Sundance. Pairing her with Hoffman on a museum civics hour is the odd credit. The trailer is on Netflix's YouTube. The motto in the title is E Pluribus Unum. A 34-minute class with RBG at the end, directed by a filmmaker who had already gone after the Chinese state. , , ,
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