Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Watch Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) online on iFILM — Morgan Neville's documentary portrait of Fred Rogers, the ordained Presbyterian minister who spent more than thirty years talking to American children on public television about feelings, death and kindness.

Drawing on decades of archival footage and conversations with Rogers' closest collaborators — including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and longtime cast member François Clemmons — Neville builds a case that the man behind Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was exactly who he appeared to be. No gap between the persona and the person. That turns out to be the most surprising fact in the film.

What makes it stick is not nostalgia but a quietly uncomfortable question: Rogers believed television was either a tool or a weapon, and he chose to fight for the former. The film became the highest-grossing biographical documentary in US box-office history at the time of its release. Stream Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) online on iFILM.