Legal Shark

“While other children were frightened of ghosts and monsters, I feared the police, the President and the FBI,” says Emily Kunstler, who along with sister Sarah grew up in New York with America’s most hated lawyer. Their father, William Kunstler, represented cop killers, terrorists and the mafia. He also raised his daughters to be hyper-aware of their white, middle-class racism. After earning film and law degrees, respectively, they founded Off Center Media in 2001 to make advocacy films about criminal justice and offer a forgiving portrait of their father in a new documentary, href="http://www.disturbingtheuniverse.com/" title="William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.">William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. . href="http://arthousefilmsonline.com/" title="Arthouse Films">Arthouse Films’ David Koh, who acquired the film at Sundance (where the sisters won the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth Vision Award), describes the film as something every young person should see to really understand what’s going on in America today.

William Kunstler’s first call to arms was a life-changing visit to Mississippi in 1961. “Our dad created his own personal mythology,” Sarah explains. “His journey to the South was important to his myth. He told it again and again.” A Purple Heart recipient turned anti-war activist, he would continue to deconstruct the system’s “aura of legality” until his death in 1995. His speeches were sweeping and provocative, and he sparked what Phil Donahue called a “new idea of judicial theater.”

Kunstler thrived on controversy and its limelight. He defended the Chicago Seven after the ’68 DNC riots, mediated a government standoff with the American Indian Movement and preserved flag burning rights before the Supreme Court. “Consistency is boring. It is not where change happens,” notes Emily. “With our next film we are excited to explore something outside of our immediate family…you can only spend so much time exploring the intricacies of your own family before you begin to lose your mind.”

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe opened theatrically in November 2009 and on PBS in 2010.