DocuClub in October: Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 7 p.m.
Our next DocuClub screening will take place on Wednesday, October 15, at 7 p.m., at Goldcrest Post (799 Washington Street, between Horatio and Gansevoort), in New York City’s West Village. Our moderator will be Dr. Seth Clark Silberman, a New York-based independent scholar who writes on race, gender, and sexuality in popular culture. He has taught film studies at Yale University, and is currently working on a novel that considers how films both mediate and facilitate the ways in which we connect with one another.
Please join us as we screen DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE: RADICAL LAWYER WILLIAM KUNSTLER by Sarah and Emily Kunstler. William Kunstler was one of the most famous lawyers of the twentieth century. When he spoke about his past, he was like a hero from legend. He fought for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., and represented activists protesting the Vietnam War. When the inmates took over Attica prison, or Native Americans stood up to the federal government at Wounded Knee, they asked Kunstler to be their lawyer. It seemed to his daughters that he was at the center of everything important that had ever happened. But Emily and Sarah weren’t around for their father’s glory days. The sisters were born in the late 1970s when Kunstler was almost sixty-years-old. When they were growing up, he represented some of the most unpopular members of society: people accused of rape, terrorism, organized crime and cop killing. Was Kunstler’s later work consistent with the moral code he claimed to live by? In DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE, the filmmakers explore their father’s life, from middle-class family man, to movement lawyer, to “the most hated lawyer in America." You can view a short trailer at www.disturbingtheuniverse.com.
Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler (producers/directors) manage Off Center Media (www.off-center.com), a production company that produces documentaries exposing injustices in the criminal justice system.
Emily Kunstler graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a B.F.A. in Film and Video in 2000. She worked as a video producer for Democracy Now!, an independent national television and radio news program that broadcasts on the Pacifica Radio Network and on public access and satellite television. With Off Center Media, Emily has produced, directed and edited a number of short documentaries, including TULIA, TEXAS: SCENES FROM THE DRUG WAR (2003), which won Best Documentary Short at the Woodstock Film Festival, and was instrumental in winning exoneration for thirty-five wrongfully-convicted people.
Sarah Kunstler graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Photography in 1998 and from Columbia Law School with a J.D. in 2004. She is currently a criminal defense attorney practicing in the Southern District of New York. Along with Emily, she has produced and directed a number of short documentaries, including GETTING THROUGH TO THE PRESIDENT (2004), which has aired on the Sundance Channel, Current TV, and Channel Thirteen/WNET. DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE is the sisters’ first documentary feature.
If you plan to attend, please RSVP to: docuclub@artsengine.net.
Admission is free to current DocuClub members and $5 for non-members.
Membership is an annual $40, which includes free admission to all DocuClub events. To join or renew, please go to:
www.artsengine.net/store/#tools_consul
About DocuClub
DocuClub is Arts Engine’s monthly film screening series of works-in-progress documentaries. For more info, please go to: www.docuclub.org.
