Melbourne Documentary Film Festival: ‘The Boys Who Said NO!’
Judith Ehrlich has long been drawn to the moral fault lines of the Vietnam era. Her earlier film on Daniel Ellsberg established her command of the period, yet The Boys Who Said NO! shifts the lens to the young men who refused the draft outright and accepted the legal consequences that followed.
The Melbourne Documentary Film Festival screening marked one stop on a wider festival run that ultimately brought the film four major awards, including the Supreme Jury Prize for Feature Documentary. The picture is now available for colleges, schools, libraries, and community groups through Bullfrog Films, while international sales continue for broadcast and streaming platforms.
Ehrlich’s interest in nonviolent resistance threads through her body of work. She frames the film as the third installment in a triptych that examines how ordinary people have challenged systems built on violence and coercion.
Current Availability and Distribution
The film has moved beyond its initial festival circuit and now reaches audiences through established educational channels. Colleges and community organizations book screenings directly, allowing the stories of draft resistance to circulate in classrooms and town halls rather than solely on festival screens. International rights remain in active negotiation for broader broadcast and streaming placement.
The awards accumulated during its festival run helped secure these distribution deals. Each recognition reinforced the film’s value as a record of organized, nonviolent opposition to an unpopular war and an inequitable draft.
Legacy and Impact as Nonviolent Resistance Playbook
Reviewers and programmers have noted that the documentary functions as a practical guide for later generations of activists. Its account of young men flooding courtrooms, refusing induction, and sustaining morale under indictment has been cited in workshops and study groups focused on civil disobedience.
Ehrlich has observed that the film supplies a working model for building campaigns that rely on collective refusal rather than confrontation. Screenings often conclude with discussions that treat the historical record as a template rather than simple nostalgia.
Ongoing Screenings and Relevance
Five years after its Melbourne premiere, the film continues to appear on public-television schedules and at community events. A 2025 KPBS segment revisited the resistance movement with Ehrlich and local organizers, underscoring that the questions the film raises about conscience and conscription remain unsettled.
Festival and campus programmers keep booking the title because the archival material and firsthand testimony retain immediacy. New audiences encounter the same tactical choices that confronted the original resisters, now framed against contemporary debates over military service and political dissent.
Ehrlich began her professional life far from the editing room. She served as a school principal and later coordinated early-childhood programs at UC Berkeley, designing curricula and training staff. Photography and public-radio production followed, then multi-image slide presentations and eventually long-form documentaries for public television.
Her introduction to cinema came early. In high school she joined a film club run by a friend whose family screened independent and foreign titles in a Napa barn. The first viewings of Fellini, Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali convinced her that the darkened room itself held lasting appeal.
Documentary work suited her curiosity. She prefers assembling stories from the words of living witnesses and from archival fragments rather than inventing narrative structures. The discipline of research and the discipline of listening remain central to her practice.
The Boys Who Said NO! grew directly from her earlier film on Ellsberg. Where that project examined the government’s internal knowledge of an unwinnable war, the new film turns to the men who acted on that knowledge by refusing to serve. The two pictures together trace the arc from classified revelation to public refusal.
Ehrlich notes that Americans still disagree sharply about the war’s moral standing. Some continue to view it as a necessary stand; others, including the director, see it as an asymmetrical assault on a rural population. That divide has never fully closed, and the film revisits the fracture without softening either side.
Production required constant movement between roles. Ehrlich coordinated researchers, editors, and former resisters on two continents. She credits the Australian post-production team, editor Scott Walton and producer Paul Butler, with shaping the final cut under demanding conditions.
She argues that documentaries now perform work once expected of an independent press. With corporate consolidation narrowing the range of reported stories, long-form nonfiction has become one of the few venues for sustained, on-the-ground inquiry.
The resistance movement documented in the film operated as the disciplined, nonviolent wing of the larger anti-war effort. Thousands of young men faced indictment; several thousand served prison time. Their strategy of overloading court calendars and filling courtrooms with supporters slowed the machinery of conscription and kept the moral argument visible.
Ehrlich hopes viewers leave with a concrete sense that refusal, when organized and sustained, can alter policy. She points to current street actions in both the United States and Australia as evidence that the same logic of collective non-cooperation remains available to new movements.
She believes filmmakers carry an obligation to surface stories that shift public understanding. In her view, the camera is not neutral; the choice of subject already constitutes an argument about what matters.
Her list of dream projects has largely overlapped with the films she has completed. An earlier attempt to profile Fred Rogers was set aside, only to be realized years later by another director. She continues to favor subjects defined by moral courage over spectacle.
Five years on, Ehrlich remains active. She is again based in Australia and continues to develop new work while occasionally returning to the United States for screenings and archival research.
Among emerging voices she cites Dawn Porter and the filmmakers nurtured by Stanley Nelson’s company. She also singles out Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence for their formal invention and moral seriousness.
Her personal canon includes Man on Wire, Sugarman, Amy, Burden of Dreams, Fog of War, Freedom on My Mind, Nostalgia for the Light. Each, she says, demonstrates how rigorous research and patient observation can produce cinema that lingers.
At the time of the original interview she was already deep into The Mouse That Roared, a project centered on Icelandic activist and former Pirate Party member Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Related whistleblower stories have continued to surface, and Ehrlich has adjusted the scope of that work in response to shifting access and new source material.
She prefers to remain behind the camera. If pressed to name directors she admires for their ethical clarity and craft, she mentions Abbey Disney and Werner Herzog, yet insists she has no desire to become the subject of anyone’s film.
