Greta Schiller, “Before Stonewall”

“I made a whole film, Paris Was a Woman, about lesbians in Paris between the wars. Now we have the internet, and the communication on the web, and people can fly places, and you can live anywhere and still connect with other queer people. But back then you lived in Greenwich Village. You lived in the Left Bank of Paris. You lived in San Francisco. It was so hard if you didn’t.”

Such were the reflections of the award-winning director Greta Schiller when I recently got her on the phone to chat about First Run Features’s newly restored version of her landmark documentary Before Stonewall, in theaters this month (June 21st in NYC, June 28th in LA, with a national rollout to follow). Filmed in 1984 with a team that included co-director Robert Rosenberg and research director Andrea Weiss – who would go on to win both an Emmy for her work and Schiller’s heart (the married couple now run Jezebel Productions) – the film contains a treasure chest of revelations to surprise even the most queer history-savvy viewer.

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