In Production
The Five Demands
Produced and Directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss
In April 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students shut down the City College of New York, demanding greater access for students of color. Although the Sixties are widely known as an era of student activism, far more attention has been paid to white middle class students opposing the Vietnam War than to a handful of students of color on a campus in the middle of Harlem. Yet this protest transformed the culture, mission, and curriculum of higher education. Fueled by the era's revolutionary fervor, the CCNY strike turned into an uprising, leading to the extended occupation of the campus, buildings set on fire, and the forced resignation of the college president. The Five Demands documents this explosive student takeover and its lasting legacy.
More information @ thefivedemandsfilm.com
Supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.
Love Letters by Greta Schiller
In the winter of 1977, Liz left her husband and four small children at home in Australia and came to New York City on a Fulbright award. There she met Kate, a paradigm-shifting feminist scholar, and they fell in love at first sight. Back then, it was a given that any lesbian mother was deemed unfit to raise her own children. But Liz’s newfound passion and self-discovery gave her the courage to fight for her kids, and for herself. In “Love Letters,” the traditional patriarchal values of the era, in which women and children were seen as possessions of men, collide head on with the newly energized, audacious lesbian feminist movement. The highly charged custody case uses courtroom line-drawing animation and verbatim testimony to tell a dramatic story of social ostracism and personal triumph. This is the story of a blazing lesbian love affair, begun in the revolutionary feminist ferment of 1970’s New York City and still going strong almost 50 years later.
Supported in part by the NYC Women's Fund for Media
