Yours in Sisterhood

A collective portrait of feminist conversation 40 years ago and today based on letters sent to Ms. Magazine in the 1970s.

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SYNOPSIS

YOURS IN SISTERHOOD is a performative, participatory documentary inspired by the breadth and complexity of letters that were sent in the 1970s to the editor of Ms.- America's first mainstream feminist magazine. The film documents hundreds of strangers from around the U.S. who were invited to read aloud and respond to these letters written by women, men and children from diverse backgrounds. Collectively, the letters feel like an encyclopedia of both the 70s and the women's movement- an almost literal invocation of the second-wave feminist slogan "the personal is political." The intimate, provocative, and sometimes heartbreaking conversations that emerge from these performances invite viewers to think about the past, present, and future of feminism.

PRESS

"A kind of living time capsule putting the past into a dialogue with the present."

New York Times

"Irene Lusztig's documentary set-up succeeds in bringing a wealth of experiences from an earlier generation of the feminist movement into a complex dialogue with the present."

Berlinale

"Brings ’70s era Ms. Magazine letters to life."

Women and Hollywood

"Yours in Sisterhood delves into the archive…bringing neglected letters into the circulation they sought, and changing their unpublished pasts into public futures where their voices are heard. It uses the letter as a form of time travel, and even teleportation. This is science fiction at its highest order: moving non-linearly through time and space, beaming us from past to future and back again, transforming bodies into other bodies through quantum connections."

So Mayer Author of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema

"Yours in Sisterhood reminds us that stories are a key step towards women’s liberation. With a film like this one out there to inspire our own feminist actions at a time like today—hope remains."

Agnes Films

"Formally inventive and deeply moving. This dialogue of generations is genuinely thrilling, particularly in an age where nuance is seemingly of a bygone era. A near masterpiece, this film."

Criterion Cast

"Lusztig handles history materially and viscerally. She asks us not to simply admire or condemn and thereby distance ourselves from what she found in this feminist archive, but to engage with the ongoing violence, discrimination, and, sometimes, loneliness and isolation described by the letters, as they happen right now, today. The result is simple and staggering."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Irene Lusztig remaps the connections between then and now, here and there, you and I with brilliant formal clarity. By giving voice to the unheard letters, Lusztig and those she films also remind us that ordinary women in every corner of the country, who have drawn primarily from personal experience, have been some of feminism’s most brilliant thinkers."

Shilyh Warren, Associate Professor University of Texas at Dallas

"Unconventional and provocative. Inventively fuses the past with the present - and reminds viewers how, in many ways, little has changed for women in America. The letters, which encompass topics such as sexual harassment and assault, and racism and white supremacy, instantaneously bring to mind parallels to the current day. A fascinating experiment in space and performance."

Marina Fang The Huffington Post

"A stirring documentary. Highly recommended."

Video Librarian

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

Nominee for Inside Out Special Award for Innovation, Inside Out Toronto LBGT Film Festival
Special Mention, Queer Porto - International Queer Film Festival

Melbourne International Film Festival
AFI DOCS
Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival
Berlinale Forum
Frameline - San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival
Documenta Madrid
Pink Apple LGBT Film Festival
Art of the Real, Lincoln Center
Docaviv Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival
Olhar de Cinema Festival Internacional de Curitiba
New Horizons Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Irene Lusztig

IRENE LUSZTIG is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. She is invested in expanding the form of artful nonfiction through her lyrical use of archival images, her commitment to listening-centered and collaborative cinematic approaches, patient durational shooting, and open-ended, associative editing where the viewer is encouraged to make connections between past and present. She is the solo director, producer, DP, and editor of three acclaimed feature length documentaries that have screened widely in festivals and are distributed by Women Make Movies: her debut film RECONSTRUCTION (2001), the feature length archival film essay THE MOTHERHOOD ARCHIVES (2013), and the performative documentary YOURS IN SISTERHOOD (2018).

Born in England and raised in Boston, Irene is a first generation American whose parents left Ceaucescu’s Romania in the late 1960s. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Professor of Film and Digital Media. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. (11/21)

Subject Areas

The Motherhood Archives

Archival montage, science fiction and an homage to 1970s feminist filmmaking are woven together to form this haunting and lyrical essay film excavating hidden histories of childbirth in the twentieth century. After several years of buying films online and working in historical archives, award-winning filmmaker Irene Lusztig amassed an unusual and fascinating collection of found footage aimed at teaching women how to be pregnant, give birth, and look after babies, along with training films for obstetricians and health care professionals, and a handful of home movies. Assembling her extraordinary trove from over 100 different sources, including newly rediscovered Soviet and French childbirth material tracing the evolution of Lamaze, THE MOTHERHOOD ARCHIVES inventively untangles the complex, sometimes surprising genealogies of maternal education. This extraordinary achievement illuminates our changing narratives of maternal success and failure while raising important questions about our social and historical constructions of motherhood.

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Reconstruction

Filmmaker Irene Lusztig unearths a dark family secret in search of answers and reconciliation in her breakthrough feature documentary, RECONSTRUCTION. In communist Romania 1959, Lusztig’s maternal grandmother, Monica Sevianu, took part in a failed bank robbery (known as the Ioanid Gang bank heist) and was condemned to life in prison. Forty years later, the filmmaker returns to Bucharest to reassemble the pieces of her shocking story and construct a portrait of her estranged and enigmatic grandmother. The title of the documentary derives from a bizarre government propaganda film that reenacts the crime and trial of the robbery and shockingly stars the actual members of the Ioanid Gang – including Monica Sevianu. This surreal docu-drama incorporates interviews, contemporary footage shot in Bucharest and rare archival images, Lusztig reveals a mesmerizing family story spanning three generations about the subversive crime of six Jewish intellectuals, while presenting a compelling and complex examination of modern-day Romania.

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Some American Feminists

SOME AMERICAN FEMINISTS explores one of the most significant social histories of this century-the second wave of the women's movement-and is a fascinating flashback on the women's liberation agenda in the light of 1990s backlash. Inspirational interviews with Ti-Grace Atkinson, Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedan, Margo Jefferson, Lila Karp and Kate Millett are intercut with newsreel footage of the tumultuous sixties and early seventies. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Some American Feminists is critical viewing for all those interested in women's studies, history and social studies.

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My Feminism

MY FEMINISM is a critically important look at second wave feminism in the 1990’s, a time rife with anti-feminist backlash. Powerful interviews with feminist leaders including bell hooks, Gloria Steinem, and Urvsahi Vaid are intercut with documentary sequences to engagingly explore the past and present and future status of the women's movement. Discussing the unique contributions of second wave feminism, they explore their racial, economic and ideological differences and shared vision of achieving equality for women. An essential component of women's studies curricula, MY FEMINISM introduces feminism's key themes while exposing the cultural fears underlying the lesbian baiting, backlash, and political extremism which informed feminist dialogues in the 90’s, some of which continues to this day.

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Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders

In 1965, when three women walked into the US House of Representatives in Washington D.C., they had come a very long way. Neither lawyers nor politicians, they were ordinary women from Mississippi,and descendants of African slaves. They had come to their country’s capital seeking civil rights, the first black women to be allowed in the senate chambers in nearly 100 years. A missing chapter in our nation’s record of the Civil Rights movement, this powerful documentary reveals the movement in Mississippi in the 1950’s and 60’s from the point of view of the courageous women who lived it – and emerged as its grassroots leaders. Their living testimony offers a window into a unique moment when the founders’ promise of freedom and justice passed from rhetoric to reality for all Americans. Through moving interviews and powerful archival footage, STANDING ON MY SISTERS' SHOULDERS weaves a story of commitment, passion and perseverance and tells the story of the women fought for change in Mississippi and altered the course of American history forever.

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THE HERETICS

Tracing the influence of the Women’s Movement’s Second Wave on art and life, THE HERETICS is the exhilarating inside story of the New York feminist art collective that produced “Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” (1977-92). In this feature-length documentary, cutting-edge video artist/writer/director Joan Braderman, who joined the group in 1975 as an aspiring filmmaker, charts the collective’s challenges to terms of gender and power and its history as a microcosm of the period’s broader transformations. On the road with her camera crew from New Mexico to Italy, Braderman reconnects with 28 other group members, including writer/critic Lucy Lippard, architect Susanna Torre, filmmaker Su Friedrich, and artists Ida Applebroog, Mary Miss, Miriam Schapiro, and Cecilia Vicuña. Still funny, smart and sexy, the geographically dispersed participants revisit how and why they came together and the extraordinary times they shared—supporting and exploring women’s art and demanding the right to be heard. Enlivened by striking digital motion graphics, THE HERETICS intercuts interviews with archival film clips, video and stills from the period, texts and images from “Heresies” magazines, and footage of completed artworks and works-in-progress. An exuberant, multi-layered collage, the film brings the Heresies collective—and its strategies for unlocking the potential in women’s lives—vividly to the screen.

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Feminist: Stories From Women’s Liberation

Structured as a personal journey of rediscovery by filmmaker Jennifer Lee, this documentary brings the momentous first decade of secondwave feminism vividly to life. Its trajectory starts with the earliest stirrings in 1963 and ends with the movement’s full blossoming in 1970—from the Presidential Commission’s report on widespread discrimination against women and publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique up through radical feminists’ takeover of the Statue of Liberty and Friedan’s calls for a women’s strike for equality. A wealth of period footage captures landmark events and the pivotal roles of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Redstockings, and other organizations. Thirty-five diverse interviewees, including rank-and-file activists along with well-known feminists Betty Friedan, Frances M. Beale, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and others, share memories of the period as well as issues and challenges that still resonate today. A great introduction to Women’s Studies and critical viewing for historians and academics interested in feminism, activism and the Women’s Movement.

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OUR CATALOG