An abortion documentary backed by Hillary Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence is taking an unusual route to audiences courtesy of Bumble Inc, the Austin-based dating app company.
Zurawski v Texas, which screened to critical raves and sold out crowds at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend, will premiere in Austin on Sept. 24 as part of a theatrical rollout financed by Bumble. The dating app, which supplied part of the movie’s budget, will also fund a series of free screenings at Alamo Drafthouse theaters around the country on Sept. 25.
The Zurawski v Texas filmmakers are still looking for a traditional distributor for their documentary, one of several political nonfiction films seeking a buyer this election year, including Errol Morris’s Separated, on Trump’s border policy, and Apocalypse in the Tropics, Petra Costa’s look at far-right politics in Brazil. But the Zurawski v Texas producers are prioritizing getting their film seen ahead of the November elections, regardless of whether a deal closes with a studio or streamer.
“The distribution landscape for documentaries is clearly in a moment of flux—but that just means we all need to be a little more entrepreneurial in terms of how our films find their way to audiences,” says Blye Pagon Faust, a producer with Story Force Entertainment, which backed Zurawski v Texas alongside Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s HiddenLight Productions and Lawrence’s Excellent Cadaver.
Zurawski v Texas, which is directed by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, tracks a high stakes post-Roe v Wade legal case in which 20 women sued the state of Texas in 2023 because they said its restrictive law prevented them from receiving medically necessary abortions. The film follows Molly Duane, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, and three of the case’s plaintiffs, including Amanda Zurawski, who could not get an abortion for her non-viable pregnancy, nearly died from the complications and suffered permanent damage that left her unable to carry a baby in the future.
Crow and Perrault had worked on a 2016 documentary called Jackson, about the last remaining abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. That clinic would go on to be at the center of the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, spurring the filmmakers, who are from Texas, to revisit the issue.
Just as Crow and Perrault were grappling with the Dobbs case’s implications for reproductive health in Texas, so too were Bumble’s employees, says the company’s chief legal officer Elizabeth Monteleone. “We started looking at our employee benefits and wondering, what do we do now? How do we talk to our employees about this? What can we offer them?” Bumble became the first of 40 businesses to sign an amicus brief in Zurawski v Texas, which argued that ambiguity in the Texas ban negatively impacts the state’s economy, costing an estimated $14.5 billion in lost revenue each year. (South by Southwest was another of the signatories. Penske Media, parent company of The Hollywood Reporter, is the majority stakeholder of SXSW.)
“The amicus brief was focused on hiring, recruiting, retention and the issues that we and the other companies have experienced being in Texas,” Monteleone says. “There’s increased cost to the company. They’re all very real problems that these bans place on companies when it comes to taking care of their employees and expanding their workforce.” Bumble said it lost one-third of its Texas workforce after the passage of 2021’s Texas Senate Bill 8, which prohibits most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. In addition to its role in the legal case, Bumble also gave finishing financing to the Zurawski filmmakers.
Bumble, which was founded by a female entrepreneur, Whitney Wolfe Herd, and built upon the premise of women being the ones to initiate contact in a dating app, has had a tumultuous year. Like most dating apps, Bumble has struggled to convince Gen Z to become paying subscribers at the rate previous generations did, and in January it hired a new CEO, Lidiane Jones, from Slack, to reverse the downward trend of its stock, which currently trades around $6, a precipitous drop from the $76 per share of its 2021 IPO. In the spring, the company pulled an ad campaign that winkingly referenced celibacy in an attempted nod at dating app fatigue that ended up offending some women.
The decision to back Zurawski v Texas pre-dates the company’s leadership change, and is not part of a larger strategy to enter Hollywood. “We had no plans to get into producing films, but we care about this issue a lot,” says Selby Drummond, Bumble’s chief marketing officer. “When the Dobbs decision came out we thought, OK, Bumble is going to lean in here. Our mission is to create healthy, equitable, safe relationships. So we were all incredibly personally invested in women’s healthcare. There was a high sense of urgency.”
Bumble-sponsored Zurawksi v Texas screenings will take place in cities including Washington, Houston, San Antonio, Raleigh and Naples, Fla. In addition, the directors will travel to 18 film festivals over the course of the fall. “We are working as quickly as we can because we think this film serves as an educational tool about what’s happening in the country,” says Crow.
This story appeared in the Sept. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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