Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski has died at 78. Her first film, “The Loving Story,” chronicled the relationship which led to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing interracial relationships. It won a Peabody for its “gorgeous and sympathetic telling of a couple’s fight to persevere in the face of injustice.” Buirski founded and for 10 years ran the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. In 2017, she appeared on Democracy Now! to talk about her film “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” about a 24-year-old Black sharecropper who was gang-raped in 1944 and refused to be silenced. This is Nancy Buirski in the Democracy Now! studio.
Nancy Buirski: “Recy Taylor is amazingly courageous for speaking up. As you mentioned, very few women did that. They were afraid for their lives. Their families would be threatened, and their friends’ livelihoods would be threatened. So, what she did was extraordinary. And, you know, we made this film before this #MeToo movement. We had no idea that this would all erupt. But now, as I look back on it, I realize that Recy Taylor’s story is the first link in a long chain. It may—not even the first link. It really goes back to slavery. But it is a very pivotal link in a chain that goes right through the civil rights movement, right up through Black Power, and obviously is resolved today.”
Top