BINGHAMTON, NY – The Harpur Cinema Department at Binghamton University will host visiting video artist Emily Kunstler who will feature her film titled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 2 in Lecture Hall 6, on campus. An informal discussion by Kunstler will follow the screening. This event is free and open to the public:
Wednesday, May 2: Visiting artist, Emily Kunstler (In Person)
The program will include:
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe (2009) – black and white 85 minutes. Distributor: Arthouse Films. An Off-Center Media Production. Produced and directed by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler.
William Kunstler was one of the most famous and controversial lawyers of the 20th century. Inthe1960s and ‘70s, Kunstler fought for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. and represented the famed “Chicago 8” activists who protested the Vietnam War. When the inmates took over Attica prison or when the American Indian Movement stood up to the federal government at Wounded Knee, they asked Kunstler to be their lawyer. He represented civil rights and anti-war activists, as well as accused terrorists and murderers.
In William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, filmmakers Emily and Sarah Kunstler explore the life of their father, from middle-class family man, to movement lawyer, to the most hated lawyer in America.
Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe is an award winning feature documentary, which screened at over 50 festivals nationally and internationally and was released theatrically in 26 cities.
It also opened the 2010 season of POV on PBS, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2011. “A superior documentary.” – The Los Angeles Times.
Emily Kunstler runs Off Center Media, a production company that produces documentaries exposing injustice in the criminal justice system. She co-founded Off Center Media with her sister Sarah in 2000, and with Off Center, has produced, directed and edited a number of short documentaries including Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War (2002), which won Best Documentary Short at the Woodstock Film Festival and was instrumental in winning exoneration for 46 wrongfully convicted people; and Getting Through to the President (2004), which has aired on the Sundance Channel, Current TV and Channel Thirteen/WNET. These films have contributed to campaigns to stay executions, convince decision-makers to reopen cases and exonerate the wrongfully convicted.
Emily Kunstler graduated in 2000 from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA and honors in film and video. She was a video producer for Democracy Now!, an independent national television and radio news program, and a studio art fellow with the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004. Emily is also a co-founder of the Kent State Truth Tribunal, founded in 2010 to bring out and record the truth of what happened at Kent on May 4, 1970.
For more information, contact the Binghamton University Cinema Department at 607-777-4998.
