This remarkable documentary chronicles the late 20th century into the 21st, as experienced by a woman who might be the original news junkie. Marion Stokes (1929–2012) became known as a passionate activist, articulately espousing her leftist views on local television in Philadelphia.

Recorder pulls you into her secret life, revealing that she spent decades obsessively recording TV programs around the clock. From the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis to the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Stokes captured revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials on 70,000 VHS tapes. A second marriage brought wealth, but she ultimately became a recluse who saw her life’s work to be protecting the truth by archiving everything on TV.