Love Letters

2024 · 40 min · Documentary

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.

Directed by Greta Schiller