Sunday, 10/28, 2:00pm (Session XXXI)

Director: Nancy Buirski
Producer: Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James 

Description: 

The Loving Story tells the story of the drama, history, and current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States, through the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving. Married in Washington, D.C. on June 2, 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter returned home to Virginia where their marriage was declared illegal—he was white, and she was black and Native American. At the time, anti-miscegenation laws were upheld in 16 states. The Lovings refused to leave one another and, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, took their case to the courts. Hope Ryden’s luminous, newly discovered 16mm footage of the Lovings and their young ACLU lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, as well as first-person testimony by their daughter Peggy Loving and rare documentary photographs by LIFE Magazine photographer Grey Villet, recounts the little-known story of the Loving family. Their case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, whose decision—under Chief Justice Earl Warren—finally struck down state laws against interracial marriage throughout the country. The Loving Story takes us behind the scenes of the legal challenges and the emotional turmoil that they entailed, documenting a seminal moment in American history and reflecting a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.

Biography:

Nancy Buirski is the founder and was the director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the acclaimed international festival based in Durham, NC. Buirski produced five collections of documentary shorts in collaboration with Docurama and The Katrina Experience, a collection of feature-length documentaries for libraries and schools. She served as the executive producer of Pangea Day Film Content. She is currently the producer of Althea and Harlem Woodstock and she produced Time Piece, an innovative cross-cultural omnibus documentary combining stories of Turkish and American filmmakers. Following The Loving Story, Buirski is directing Tanaquil Le Clercq: Afternoon of a Faun. Prior to her work in film, she was a documentary photographer, writing and photographing Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America, and the foreign picture editor at The New York Times.

Contact Information:

Icarus Films
E-mail: mail@icarusfilms.com
Web site: www.icarusfilms.com