Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker whose work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale and MoMA, and on television in Europe, Taiwan, and the U.S. Her credits include her feature-length debut “Reconstruction,” “The Motherhood Archives,” and “The Samantha Smith Project.” She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media.
“Yours in Sisterhood” will premiere at the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival on April 28.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
IL: “Yours in Sisterhood” is based on the thousands of letters that were sent to the editor of Ms. Magazine — the first mainstream feminist magazine in the U.S. — in the 1970s. I spent a summer reading this amazing archive of ’70s feminist voices. The letters are about an incredibly diverse range of issues and were written by an equally diverse range of writers of all ages backgrounds from across the U.S.
I spent two and a half years traveling around the U.S. inviting strangers in 32 states to participate in the project by reading aloud and responding to the letters sent from their hometown. The film that has emerged from this process is a kind of collective portrait of feminist conversation in the U.S. from forty years ago and today.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
IL: The film holds a multitude of stories, people, places, ideas, and feminisms, and this richness is precisely what drew me to both the original archive of letters and to the methods I developed for making the project.
As a filmmaker, I’m interested in the complex and messy. I rarely set out to tell a straightforward story with a beginning, middle, and end, but instead I aim to create an open space where a viewer can spend time thinking, questioning, and exploring.
That said, I did feel very drawn to thinking about ’70s feminism in all of its messy complexity, to the energy that I felt reading all of those letters in the archive, and to the amazing ways that feminist organizers were able to create radical spaces of conversation.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
IL: I hope people are thinking hard about lots of big ideas: intergenerational feminism, the meaning and potential of intimate conversation and public discourse, the shifting relationship between history and the present, the importance of listening across difference to perspectives that diverge from your own, time travel, space, geography, landscape, embodiment, and empathy.
My favorite films are films that take days or weeks to digest — where I am still drawing out new meanings and connections a long time afterwards.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
IL: It was a huge challenge to make this film with almost no significant funding. When you get funding it makes you feel confident and it gives you permission to keep following your vision — you know you have the support of institutions that trust you and your ideas. I struggled with rejection after rejection, and really had to make my own network of support to keep moving forward with the project.
Ultimately, though, I felt incredibly supported and trusted by the hundreds of strangers who volunteered to participate in the project. The more people I met and filmed with, the more I had a powerful sense of belief in the work that we were doing together and in the incredible urgency of having these conversations about feminism right now, and that energy is what carried the project forward.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
IL: It was extremely difficult and discouraging to find any funding as I was making the project. The film got rejected by every major grant in the U.S. Feminist work and work that centers women’s voices is always very difficult to fund. And feminist work that is also stylistically unconventional, formally challenging, or that doesn’t tell an easy-to-digest story with a single main character is even harder to fund.
For most of the four years of making the project, I cobbled together tiny amounts of research funding from the university where I teach — just a few thousand dollars a year — plus a couple of very local artist grants. I produced, researched, operated the camera, and edited the project myself. I worked with a tiny crew — just one other person at the time — and hired my recent students.
I’m fortunate to have a full-time university teaching job, so I didn’t need to raise money to pay myself. The whole project was made for a fraction of what a normal budget would look like for a feature length film with 120 shooting days and a full year of editing.
I did have to do an emergency crowdfunding campaign at the very end of my project. I found out the film had gotten into Berlin just as I got rejected from the final two grants I had applied for. I was completely out of money, and I did need a bigger chunk of money for the final round of finishing post-production that I wasn’t able to do by myself. I raised this money literally during the final few weeks, as I was also finishing and mastering the film for Berlin.
W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at Hot Docs?
IL: I made this film with very little help in a very scrappy, intimate, DIY, and small-scale way. So I expected the film to also be very difficult to screen and to ultimately screen in intimate, small, alternative venues. So it’s been such an amazing surprise to be invited to show this film at top international festivals like the Berlinale and Hot Docs.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
IL: Worst advice: One of my undergrad film teachers once told me that I needed to be less respectful and to worry less about being ethical if I ever wanted to become an interesting filmmaker. I think that was bad advice.
Best advice: A friend told me recently to always ask for something three times. I’m naturally shy and a bad self-promoter, so I like having a rule that gives me permission to ask again even when the first answer is a no or silence.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
IL: To find or create a supportive community of friends, peers, and like-minded filmmakers who take your ambitions seriously even when the rest of the world doesn’t. And also to be really active in taking or making the space for the kinds of conversations that feel important to you: organize meetings, start a microcinema, film collective or reading group, be a programmer/filmmaker, create the context for the dialogue that you want to see in the world.
Don’t wait to be discovered or to get invited to show your work!
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
IL: I can list films by women that I love for days; I teach entire courses where I mostly show films by women. An older woman-directed film that I love and that was a big influence on this project is the collectively-produced 1971 film “The Woman’s Film,” by the San Francisco Newsreel Collective. It’s a political, feminist film that still feels incredibly radical and fresh today. It’s hard to believe it was made almost fifty years ago.
Like “Yours in Sisterhood,” it’s a film that is all about women talking to other women. It comes out of the methods of consciousness raising groups, and in fact much of it was filmed in consciousness raising groups. It’s an amazing film.
W&H: Hollywood and the global film industry are in the midst of undergoing a major transformation. Many women — and some men — in the industry are speaking publicly about their experiences being assaulted and harassed. What are your thoughts on the #TimesUp movement and the push for equality in the film business?
IL: It’s long overdue. While it’s of course exciting that these conversation are taking such a big, public forum, women have been talking among themselves about these issues for so many years. Women were talking about the exact same issues in the ’70s in the letters they sent to Ms. Magazine. It’s frustrating that these problems have endured for such a long time despite the incredible organizing and visibility work done by feminist activists in the ’70s.
I think that reveals the profoundly structural nature of the inequality that is threaded through all of our institutions and industries — firing a few powerful men and handing a microphone to a few powerful Hollywood actresses is just barely the beginning of the conversation we actually need to have.
And that conversation is not just about women — it’s about people of color, it’s about disability and illness, it’s about gender nonconforming people and much more. It’s important to build coalitions across marginalized identities rather than to push forward the visibility of one group at the expense of others.
I would love to see much more radical change around who is given resources to make work, what voices, stories, and visual forms are onscreen, and how we teach filmmaking in schools, as film schools play a huge role in perpetuating gender disparities in the film industry.
I hope that one day we no longer need women’s film blogs, “focus on women” festival sidebars, women’s film festivals, screening series, and female filmmaker funding initiatives because women and women’s issues will simply have equal representation and support in all of our cultural spaces.
