Before Stonewall
New York City’s Stonewall Inn is regarded by many as the site of gay and lesbian liberation since it was at this bar that drag queens fought back against police June 27-28, 1969. This documentary uses extensive archival film.
The legendary film from Greta Schiller reveals a lot which is missing from Roland Emmerich's Stonewall - but nevertheless agrees with him in quite a few details. The world "before Stonewall", the beginning of the post-war gay rights movement: the German portrait of this dark Adenauer era in which homosexuals were transferred directly from concentration camps to West German correctional facilities and have not been rehabilitated is yet to come. Greta Schiller later gained renown with Paris Was A Woman which she screened together with her partner and screenwriter Andrea Weiß in the 1996 Panorama.
details
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Runtime
87 min -
Country
United States -
Year of Presentation
2016 -
Year of Production
1984 -
Director
Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg -
Cast
Rita Mae Brown -
Production Company
Center for the Study of Filmed History, Before Stonewall Inc. -
Berlinale Section
Panorama -
Berlinale Category
Documentary Film
Biography Greta Schiller
Greta Schiller is an award-winning independent producer/director of documentary films and the co-founder of Jezebel Productions, a women’s nonprofit production company since 1985. Over the first three decades of her career, her work focused on unearthing lost histories of marginalized groups and writing their experiences into the cultural narrative. For her films Before Stonewall, International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, Paris Was a Woman, and The Man Who Drove with Mandela, among others, she has received two Emmy Awards, the first US/UK Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Film, Audience Awards for Best Film at numerous festivals from Berlin to Paris to Seattle, and artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts.