For 40 years, the controversial community organizing group ACORN sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals, promoting government waste and ineffective activism. These competing perceptions exploded on the national stage in 2009, just as Barack Obama became president. Fueled by a YouTube video made by undercover journalists, ACORN’s very existence would be challenged. ACORN and the Firestorm goes beyond the 24-hour news cycle and cuts to the heart of the great political divide.



The film unfolds through the perspectives of Hannah Giles and Bertha Lewis, two women on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as through the eyes of ACORN staff, to tell the story of a polarizing media frenzy that set the tone for elections to come. MORE