Before Stonewall

During the time of apartheid Nelson Mandela drove around South Africa in a limousine disguised as a chauffeur while organizing the armed struggle against the apartheid regime. But who was the distinguished looking white man sitting in the back seat? Meet Cecil Williams, an acclaimed gay white theatre director and communist.

A short documentary about the First National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which took place on Sunday, October 14th 1979.

This fairy-tale-like drama, based on a 1904 short story by American poet and feminist author Renée Vivien, tells two opposing versions of the same narrative: one told verbally by Pierre Lenoir, a male narrator at a Victorian dinner party; the other told visually through the behavior of an unnamed woman who meets him on a fantasy cargo boat. The intercutting of the two stories creates a tension between the different world views of the woman and the man.

From the Piney Woods School in the Mississippi Delta to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York City, this toe-tapping music film tells the story of the swinging, multi-racial all-women jazz band of the 1940s.

A documentary about efforts to restore and maintain biodiversity in Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Western Spain.

Women (many of them lesbian) artists, writers, photographers, designers, and adventurers settled in Paris between the wars. They embraced France, some developed an ex-pat culture, and most cherished a way of life quite different than the one left behind.

In near-future New York, ten years after the “social-democratic war of liberation,” diverse groups of women organize a feminist uprising as equality remains unfulfilled.

A history of the political and social repression carried out by the ruthless regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco between 1936 and 1975 that focuses on the lives of gays and lesbians during those dark years and the death of the Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca.

Vicky, an out-of-work actress, struggling waitress and lesbian has her whole life thrown into turmoil when her father comes from Germany to visit. The main problem is that Vicky has told him she is a successful actress and happily married. She enlists the help of a gay friend to play her husband. Using a large range of characters—gay, lesbian, straight, transsexuals—the film creates a funny and touching view of family dynamics and sexuality.

This documentary contains dramatized episodes about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant children of German writer Thomas Mann.

A German woman travels to San Francisco to find her mother, but winds up distracted by the sexually flamboyant culture of the city.

Greta's Girls lovingly depicts the quotidian moments in the domestic life of a lesbian couple and their dog in New York City. Greta's Girls is one of the first independent short films to focus on lesbians.

This profile of storied trumpeter of jazz, Tiny Davis, and her cohort pianist-drummer, Ruby Lucas, is an amalgam of artifacts about the two women, accompanied with poetry by Cheryl Clarke.

Age of Dissent captures the yearlong battle to change British legislation about the gay age of consent. It includes a visit to Russia, where homosexuality was recently legalized.

In April 1969, a small group of Black and Puerto Rican students shut down the City College of New York, an elite public university located right in the heart of Harlem. Fueled by the revolutionary fervor sweeping the nation, the strike soon turned into an uprising, leading to the extended occupation of the campus, classes being canceled, students being arrested, and the resignation of the college president. Through archival footage and modern-day interviews, we follow the students’ struggle against the institutional racism that, for over a century, had shut out people of color from this and other public universities. The Five Demands revisits the untold story of this explosive student takeover, and proves that a handful of ordinary citizens can band together to take action and effect meaningful change.

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.