Coming at a moment of profound political crisis, What Is Democracy? reflects on a word we too often take for granted. Director Astra Taylor’s philosophical journey spans millennia and continents: from the ground-breaking self-government experiment in Ancient Athens, to capitalism’s roots in medieval Italy; and from modern-day Greece, grappling with financial collapse, to the US, reckoning with its racist past and the growing gap between rich and poor. Featuring a broad range of big thinkers, including Silvia Federici, Cornel West, and Angela Davis, this urgent film connects the past and the present, the emotional and the intellectual, the personal and the political, to provoke and inspire. If we want to live in a democracy, we must first ask what the word even means.