Bully (2011 film)
2011 documentary film directed by Lee Hirsch
Bully (originally titled The Bully Project) is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Lee Hirsch and produced by Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen. It documents the lives of five students who face bullying on a daily basis in U.S. schools. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 23, 2011.
On the film's official website, the filmmakers promoted Bully as a tool to help combat bullying and facilitate an anti-bullying movement, but these goals were jeopardized by its initial R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Following a failed appeal of the rating, the Weinstein Company released the film unrated in theaters in the United States on March 30, 2012. After some profanity was removed, the film was re-rated PG-13, and this version of the film was released in theaters on April 13. The PG-13 version of the film was released on Blu-ray and DVD nearly a year later, on February 12, 2013.
Content
The film documents the lives of several public-school students and their families in Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma during the 2009-10 school year. There is a particular focus on two students who are regularly bullied, one student who has been incarcerated after brandishing a gun on a school bus in response to being bullied, and the families of two boys who were victims of bullying and died by suicide. It describes in great detail how the average American student cannot defend themselves against ridicule.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4997083. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bully (2011 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.