Marion Stokes, as seen in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Eileen Emond/Tribeca Film Festival)

The Tribeca Film Festival was off to a good start during its first weekend with the world premiere of the moving and engrossing documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. For more than 30 years, Stokes, a Philadelphia-based former librarian, civil rights activist, and television producer, recorded television programming 24 hours a day, using eight VHS recorders throughout her apartment. She corralled her chauffeur, secretary, and nurse to take part in this personal endeavor.

The end result is a treasure trove that serves as a fascinating look back at the recent past. The film is light on talking-head interviews and strong in its deluge of images of post-Watergate political milestones, including a freed Nelson Mandela, the Challenger explosion, the shootings at Sandy Hook, among many headline stories. (Remember Jessica McClure or Elián González?) There is even a brief glimpse of a young Kellyanne Conway, née Fitzpatrick, as a CNN pundit.

The film has a central mystery: What motivated Stokes to amass a personal archive of 70,000 tapes? In 1979, she began recording ABC News coverage of the American hostages held in Iran. The recordings continued into the 2010s, even as VHS tapes became harder to find. (Besides thousands of videotapes, she owned between 40,000 and 50,000 books and read 11 newspapers a day.)

The film also serves as a well-rounded portrait of an eccentric, an African American woman born in 1929 and given up to adoption, who became a communist, a panelist on a local talk show, and a recluse in her later years. She also had uncanny insight, too: she is credited here for recognizing the increasing speed of news coverage as CNN rose to prominence. Her son, Michael Metelis, points out that she was aware of the news media’s filters and its implicit bias. For example, she felt the media lacked insight/sympathy for the goals of the Iranian Revolution.

In the mid-’80s, she jumped on the Apple bandwagon with the arrival of the Mactintosh and became an “evangelist for Apple,” according to Michael. Toward the end of her life, she would venture out and have a late afternoon martini, taking home whatever she couldn’t finish in a paper cup. The film adds another layer by focusing on her relationship to John Stokes, who hailed from a white, old money, patrician family from Chestnut Hill, and according to his daughters from his first marriage, he shared Marion’s worldview. When he divorced and then married her, they moved into his apartment on Rittenhouse Square.

Beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, viewers can trace the history of that country and other long-in-the-making developments. As Stokes’s archives prove, news develops on a continuum—there’s also an illuminating clip of Jeff Sessions being grilled at his hearing for a federal judgeship about his views on civil rights. But the documentary’s centerpiece, as it were, is a screen split four ways, featuring the simultaneous news coverage of CNN, ABC, CBS, and Fox’s Good Day New York on the morning of September 11th. While CNN first broke the news of the terrorist attacks, Fox was airing a Babyface music video. You see the world changing in real time.

Curious viewers will be sated; they will come to understand why director Matt Wolf has focused on someone who they most likely never heard of.