Join New Day Film's 50th Anniversary celebration with New Day's founders, Liane Brandon, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert & Amalie R. Rothschild
Register for this online event on Eventbrite.
New Day Films is the oldest continuously functioning film distribution cooperative in the world – an extraordinary feat of filmmaking excellence wedded to economic democracy. Join new Day Films and their four founders, Liane Brandon (a WIFVNE member), Jim Klein, Julia Reichert and Amalie R. Rothschild, in conversation with several newer members of the coop, Brenda Avila-Hanna, Rodney Evans, and New Day's current chair, Suzan Beraza, as they celebrate 50 years of New Day Films!
New Day Films was founded in 1971 to distribute Growing Up Female by Julia Reichert & Jim Klein, Anything You Want To Be by Liane Brandon, and Amalie R. Rothschild’s It Happens To Us – feminist films for which distributors claimed there was no audience. How wrong they were! As Julia Reichert has said, “We could watch the women's movement spread across the country just by who was ordering our films. First it was Cambridge and Berkeley…[then] the deep South." The fledgling cooperative embraced the struggle of male counterparts with the inclusion of Men’s Lives by Josh Hanig & Will Roberts in 1974. When Debra Chasnoff joined the coop, New Day committed itself to films on the cutting edge of the gay rights movement.
As New Day grew decade by decade, it became a locus for films about the rights of indigenous people, racial equality and justice, the plight of asylum seekers and other immigrants, and the campaign to save the planet from the effects of climate change. New Day films have won Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and hundreds of prizes from prestigious film festivals, such as Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, Full Frame and more. Co-founder Julia Reichert more recently won an Oscar for American Factory (co-directed with Steve Bognar). New Day films have been broadcast worldwide, showcased in theaters, and have become preeminent in academia where the films’ high quality and pertinence to curricula are much prized.
The New Day cooperative has remained a filmmaking and distribution powerhouse by renewing itself annually with a young and diverse cohort of films and filmmakers who are media activists willing to do the hard work of self-distribution, just as the founders did. New Day is unique in the world of film distribution, and yet, many in the field know little about us.
What makes New Day Films work? This event will draw back the curtain to show how New Day’s democratic principles are applied in practice, describe how New Day’s evolution paralleled America’s social movements over half a century, and reflect on how New Day continues to grow and change as an organization in the 21st century, striving always towards greater equity and representation within the coop.
The event will have CART and ASL. The video clips that will be shown will have open captions. Please contact events@newday.com for any other access needs.
