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UB faculty contribute to Kunstler film
Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian were longtime friends of the legendary civil rights attorney William Kunstler and his second wife, Margie.
“We were very close,” said Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, noting the two couples frequently vacationed together and stayed at each others’ homes. Jackson and Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the English department, have known the Kunstlers’ daughters, Emily and Sarah, their entire lives.
It’s that connection—what Jackson called a “longstanding personal, and in some ways professional relationship”— that led to the two UB faculty members serving as consultants and contributors to a documentary film Kunstler’s daughters made about their late father.
The film, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” will make its national broadcast premiere at 10 p.m. on June 22 as part of PBS’ “P.O.V.” (point of view) documentary series. In Western New York, the film will air at 9 p.m. June 23, and again at 3:30 a.m. June 25.
It tells the story of a man who was one of the most beloved—and hated—lawyers in America: a man whose reputation was tied to his work on historic civil rights and anti-war cases, but who then in his later years defended accused rapists and terrorists. Emily and Sarah Kunstler serve as co-directors and co-producers of the film.
Jackson and Christian first met Kunstler when he was in Buffalo as a lawyer in the only murder trial to spring from the 1971 Attica prison riots. Jackson was teaching in the UB Law School at the time with Herman Schwartz, (now a faculty member at American University), who was assisting Kunstler, along with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark.
Schwartz asked “if we would like to meet William Kunstler and Ramsey Clark,” Jackson recalled during a phone call earlier this week as he and Christian were winding up a week-long trip to Paris. So the lawyers “came by the house for dinner. We had a great time,” he said.
He and Christian “immediately became close friends” with the Kunstlers, and Jackson said they remain close to Margie Kunstler. William Kunstler died in 1995.
Jackson said he and Christian have been involved with the film from its inception. Over the years Jackson has taken many photos of the Kunstler family, and a number of them were used in the documentary, he said. The film also uses footage Jackson and Christian took of Kunstler during the late 1980s trial of Larry Davis, a 23-year-old drug dealer accused of shooting six police officers during a raid on his sister’s Bronx apartment. Davis, who was represented by Kunstler, was found not guilty of attempted murder.
The film also features interviews with Jackson, and he wrote the narrative delivered by Emily Kunstler during the last section of the film.
The 85-minute documentary premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and was a nominee for the festival’s Grand Jury Prize. It was released in theaters last November, and opens the 2010 season of “P.O.V.,” PBS’ award-winning documentary series.
It has won numerous awards, among them the Grand Jury Award for Best Feature from Patois, The New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival; the Best New Filmmakers Award at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival; and an honorable mention for the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award at the Full Frame Documentary Festival.
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