A Gutsy Tribute to the Heroes and Heroines of American Labor: Barbara Kopple’s ‘Harlan County, USA’

Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.

Barbara Kopple
Barbara Kopple

 


Written by Rachael Johnson.


“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.” –Malcolm X

Directed with great spirit and empathy by Barbara Kopple, the documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) is the story of an eventful strike in eastern Kentucky. The 13-month-long Brookside Strike (1973-4), as it was called, involved 180 miners from the Duke Power-owned Eastover Mining Company’s Brookside Mine in Harlan County. The film chronicles the miners’ fight to join the United Mine Workers of America, a move prohibited by the mining company when they refuse to sign the contract. Their hard struggle for representation, better wages and working conditions is lived and portrayed as a collective one. The men are joined on the picket lines by their wives who play a central role in the story. Their dramatic journey is understood and depicted as a deeply personal and political one.

In the first few minutes of Harlan County, U.S.A, the viewer is transported into the mines. We watch the men labor, and even have a bite to eat, in the grimy, confined spaces before emerging into the light once more. This is proper political film-making. Kopple takes us into the working men’s world. She sides with the miners and we are encouraged to do so too. She gives us a strong sense of how dangerous the job is. The men’s working conditions are appalling. The miners have had black lung for generations and suffer injuries for which they receive no compensation. The living conditions the workers endure are shameful too. Their houses don’t have indoor plumbing and running water. We see one miner’s wife wash her child in a tin bucket. Kopple’s documentation of these inexcusable living conditions may shock both American and non-American audiences watching today- as they, no doubt, must have done in 1976. U.S. popular culture- particularly Hollywood- does such a good job concealing American poverty that when audiences see it, it always comes as a jolt. This is, perhaps, even the case for people who have few illusions about the American Dream. There are, of course, reminders now and again. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, for example, revealed to the world disturbing truths about US economic inequality.

Lois Scott
Lois Scott

 

Numbers cited in Harlan County, U.S.A. tell an outrageous tale: coal company profits in 1975 rose 170 percent while workers’ wages rose only 4 percent. As U.M.W. organizer Houston Elmore explains, the miners are victims of a “feudal system.” The story of Harlan County, U.S.A. is one of struggle and resistance to power. The strike rejuvenates and organizes them. It is gruelling, perilous fight too. When they are not being arrested and jailed, they are being intimidated, assaulted and shot at by mining company thugs. Kopple is always with them recording their struggle. At one frightening night-time picket, her camera is attacked. The workers begin to arm themselves too. Tragedy finally strikes when a young miner is murdered. The company soon concedes and the strike ends. While the story of the strike may be a stirring one, and the workers secure their right to unionize, there is neither a neat nor fairytale ending. Some workers are happy with their pay but others express disappointment about their contract. Union compromises like the no-strike clause indicate that the struggle for miners’ rights will continue.

Into the Mines
Into the Mines

 

The women of the community play an essential, dynamic role during the strike. As with the men, the struggle strengthens and politicizes them. They join the picket lines too, and block the roads with their bodies to prevent the scabs from getting through to the mines. The women are fully aware of what they are up against. One addresses a judge at court: “You say the laws were made for us. The laws are not made for the working people in this country…The law was made for people like Carl Horn.” Carl Horn was the president of Duke Power at the time. Although the women are not entirely immune from letting personal crap get in the way, they are focused and  determined. They are, in fact, incredibly strong. An older lady encourages them to not back down as backing down would mean a return to the dark, hungry days of the 30s. “If I get shot, they can’t shoot the union out of me,” she says. The women are also intimated, assaulted and shot at. The film rightly focuses on the collective but the community does have its characters. The most charismatic woman among them is perhaps organizer Lois Scott. Both an inspiration and a badass, Lois seems frightened of very little in life.

The Women of Harlan County
The Women of Harlan County

 

What Norman Yarborough, President of the Eastover Mining Company, says about the miners’ wives at a press conference is extremely revealing. When asked about their role, Yarborough smiles in a patronizing, good-old-boy fashion before conceding that they have played “a big role.” He goes on to say that their activities disturb him: “I would hate to think that my wife had played this kind of role….there’s been some conduct that I don’t think that our American women have to revert to.” Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.

The numerous songs featured in the documentary illustrate the central role music plays in their lives of the mining community. They chronicle the history of Harlan as they rouse and unify its people. The most memorable is “Which Side Are You On?.” Widely recognised as one of the great protest songs of the 20th century, this anthem to worker’s rights was penned by activist, folk song writer, and poet, Florence Reece. A daughter and wife of miners, Reese penned “Which Side Are You On?” during the Harlan strike of 1931. The great woman herself is featured in Harlan County, U.S.A. singing her iconic song at a strike rally.

A Company Thug
A Company Thug

 

The documentary focuses on the 1973 strike in Bloody Harlan but it also manifests an understanding of labor history. The miners, like any other exploited group, remember what was done to them decades before. Kopple connects the past to the present through powerful interviews with older residents, film footage and stills. Remembering is essential work, especially in a country where the silencing of historic abuses has always been routine. As writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Harlan County, U.S.A. is an extremely detailed, multi-layered film. The documentation of other labor-related events and struggles deepen our understanding of the time. Kopple documents leadership challenges and reforms in the union in the early seventies, the extraordinary story of the Mafia-style hit of United Mine Workers President Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter by President W.A. Boyle in 1969, as well as the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia mine explosion, a tragedy which killed 78 men.

Harlan County USA
Harlan County U.S.A.

 

Kopple gives an in-depth portrait of the men and women of the mining community of Harlan County as well as a gripping account of the strike that transforms them. She never patronizes the people of Harlan and she can never be accused of exploitative class voyeurism. From the very start, she plunges the viewer into the life of the community, and we are with them every step of the way.

Florence Reece
Florence Reece

 

Harlan County, U.S.A. is a stirring tribute to working-class kinship and activism. Although it is a story specifically rooted in the history of Harlan, as well as a very American story, the struggle for economic justice it documents is one that transcends regional and national borders. Koppel’s gutsy film-making was rewarded. Harlan County, U.S.A. won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards that year. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and it should be shown in every school in the United States.

 

 

Reality TV: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our The Reality TV Theme Week here.

What Would You Do to be Famous?: Looking at Black Mirror and Starry Eyes by Elizabeth Kiy

I’ll just say it, reality TV scares me. It has so much potential to affect the way we live and look at ourselves by showing us how other people live. It can chip away at our idea of strong womanhood by highlighting the successes only of the beautiful, compliant and willing to backstab.


Keeping up with the Kardashians: Looking at Kim Kardashian’s Naked Body by Sarah Smyth

Kardashian quite literally embodies the complex construction of the female body as something to be looked at. And with her body being so readily, excessively, and continually put on show, can we help but do anything but look?


MasterChef and Internalized Misogyny by Robin Hitchcock

Examining my sexist reaction to this season of MasterChef made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. MasterChef distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training.


Reality TV’s Antecedents: PBS, POV, and Barbara Kopple by Ren Jender

A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on POV, which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming).


Finding Faith and Feminism in The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns by Max Thornton

Nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. In medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.


Playing with Fire: “Compulsory Heterosexuality” in The Hunger Games by Colleen Clemons

While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.

Reality TV’s Antecedents: PBS, ‘POV,’ and Barbara Kopple

A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on ‘POV,’ which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming).

shut-up-and-sing_592x299

This post by Ren Jender is part of our theme week on Reality TV and includes part 2 of an interview with documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple.

Those of us who generally avoid reality TV programming would be wise to remember the genre attracts audiences for legitimate reasons. So many movies and television are based on lies: even those supposedly “based-on-fact” are riddled with enough revision and omission to make their stories unrecognizable–Slate has taken to posting a semi-regular column on how far the latest bio-pic diverges from reality. Audiences hungering for more genuine programming shouldn’t be a surprise.

When audiences tune into reality TV they are also often looking for images they don’t see onscreen otherwise–women who use wheelchairs going about their business without “uplifting” music crescendoing in the background, Black families hanging out together at home without a laugh track, women who aren’t a size 2 with sex lives that aren’t a punch line.

The problem with most reality TV is that much of it isn’t very satisfying, like eating a bag of potato chips when what one really craves is a full meal.  In spite of its name, reality TV still has a lot of fakery in it: scenes edited together to create the illusion of tension where none exists, scripts that the “stars” know to follow whether they are part of “reality” or not and women with glamorous hair and makeup when their real-life counterparts bear little resemblance to women on magazine covers.

POV featured "Living With AIDS" directed by Tina Tina DiFeliciantonio
In 1988 POV featured “Living With AIDS” directed by Tina  DiFeliciantonio

 

A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on POV, which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming). For many years POV was one of the only places on TV to see nuanced portraits of these people, especially before cable TV (and platforms like Netflix and Amazon) started to produce their own content.

POV  and documentaries in general have, historically, a far more proportionate share of women directors than the rest of the film and television industry. Barbara Kopple has been directing documentaries since the 1970s, has won two Oscars and her work has been featured, among many other places, on PBS. In part 2 of an interview I conducted with her (part 1 is here) she talks about how she began her career and the challenges through the years of making films about real people living their lives.

(This interview was edited for concision and clarity.)

pov-barbarakopple
Barbara Kopple

 

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering about your own beginnings as a filmmaker. You worked in a collective at first and with the Maysles brothers. That was the early ’70s and there were hardly any women in filmmaking then. Did you always see yourself going into directing?

Barbara Kopple: I think I did. Because I started learning everything I could possibly learn. This woman who became one of my best friends, Barbara Jarvis, who is now passed away– I’m her daughter’s godmother– I started at Maysles and she would leave me work to do at night, so I’d do the assistant editor’s work, which is what she was, at night, so I would learn. And then I got a job with this guy who was an editor and he would say to me, “OK, I’m going out to lunch and I want you to edit this piece down from 20 minutes to five minutes by the time I get back.” I started to learn storytelling. And also doing Winter Soldier, being part of that wonderful collective. I just loved talking to people. I had this incredible curiosity. Then Harlan County came up and I was able to get a loan of $12,000 to start doing it.

BF: So that was a personal loan that you got? It wasn’t from a foundation or anything?

Kopple: It was just from a producer named Tom Brandon, now passed away. I was searching everywhere to try to find money and he gave me $12,000 and I paid him back.

BF: How long did it take you?

Kopple:: Until the film was finished, and then I got a very small advance and I paid all my debts with him.

From "Harlan County, USA"
From Harlan County, USA

 

BF: That’s amazing. I know that you lived among and followed the people in Harlan County, USA for a long time to get the film that you made.

Kopple: In Harlan County  we were machine-gunned. A miner was killed by a foreman, the picket lines… I mean, every day something was happening. You couldn’t miss a moment.

BF: I realize you’ve directed a wide range of things. Have you always felt free in filming people?

Kopple: Yeah. The Dixie Chicks let us sit in on all their intimate moments…And Gregory Peck and all of them.

BF: So nobody has said, “I feel like this scene shows me in a really unflattering light, like in a big way.”

From "American Dream"
From American Dream

Kopple: Someone would close the door in our face in American Dream before we would go in. I would just open it, and sometimes, you know, when things were really tough and people were upset, they’d make me say why I wanted to film them, and then I’d get up in front of the room and say why and then they would vote and they would say, “OK.” I’d only been there months and months and months.

BF: Was that in a union setting?

Kopple: Yeah.

BF: But that’s still really amazing because quite a few people, even those who are interested in filming others would be like, “Wait a minute.”

Kopple: Then they wouldn’t do it! All these people wanted to do it. These people said, “Yes.” And if you want to do it, maybe you don’t understand what that means at the beginning…

BF: But eventually you do.

Kopple: Absolutely

BF: Now more and more women are making films, but the problem is: many have short careers, even if their films win awards, even if they really want to direct and they’re really trying to continue their careers as directors. And I’m wondering if you can think of specific things–because you’ve had a really long career–that have helped you to go from project to project. Because, correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like you haven’t taken much of a break.

Kopple: No. I probably should! I don’t know. I guess that I just…somebody will call me and say, “How would you like to do a film on…” and I’m a girl who can’t say no. I do it. I mean, I’m finishing a film now on The Nation magazine; they’re about to have their 150th anniversary in 2015, and we’re finished shooting a film on Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings. And we’re doing a very short piece on homeless veterans. I love working. I love the curiosity of it,  I love learning about people and being out there. [It’s made] my life so rich and so full. Of course I don’t do it for the money, because I can hardly keep my head above water most of the time. I do it because I love it. It doesn’t seem like so many years. Each film is just very magical and exciting and different, and it gives you energy rather than taking it away, so I really just consider it an honor to be doing what I’m doing.

BF: If you could give advice to women who are making films now, what do you think it would be?

Kopple:  I think it would be that you’re not alone that there’s tons of people out there who will help you. And only care about the story. Don’t… some people get hung up in, like, the technical, and that’s not what the story is about. It’s about the people. If you feel passionate about something, that passion’s going to flow to a lot of other people and you’re going to be able to do it. [It’s not] easy. You have your ups and your downs. I have my ups and my downs all the time.

BF: Even now?

Barbara Kopple: Yeah! I mean some things get really small budgets and I really want to make these films, so I don’t care about the money, and then I don’t know where to get it to keep paying electricity, to keep the place (her production company) going, but I just figure the films in the end are what’s going to matter. You want to put it out there. I used to dream that some white knight on a horse would come and say, “Here, do whatever you want.” Cinderella wants her lover and I want somebody to care about these films.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Mariel Hemingway: ‘Running From Crazy’

Most of us, to some extent, want to get away from the families we grew up in, to not be reminded of the people we were at 5, 10, or 15. Actress Mariel Hemingway had more reason than most: not only did her famous grandfather, Ernest, kill himself in his home, not too far from the house where she grew up, but her parents had their own problems, spending their nights drinking in the kitchen, then fighting, sometimes breaking glass and drawing blood, which Mariel, when she was still a child, would clean up.

RunningFromCrazyPets

Read ahead for an interview with the director, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple.

Most of us, to some extent, want to get away from the families we grew up in, to not be reminded of the people we were at 5, 10, or 15. Actress Mariel Hemingway had more reason than most: not only did her famous grandfather, Ernest, kill himself in his home, not too far from the house where she grew up, but her parents had their own problems, spending their nights drinking in the kitchen, then fighting, sometimes breaking glass and drawing blood, which Mariel, when she was still a child, would clean up.

In the documentary Running From Crazy, we see Hemingway reminisce about her growing up and also witness her current life, speaking to groups about suicide (her sister, the model and sometime actress, Margaux, also killed herself, and Mariel begins one talk with, “I come from seven suicides, perhaps more”), exercising with her partner Bobby, and spreading the word about holistic ways of staying physically and mentally healthy.

Thanks to archival footage the director, two-time Oscar winner (for Best Documentary feature) Barbara Kopple, discovered, we also see Margaux, in film shot for her own documentary (which you can see on Youtube) 30 years before, which retraces the steps of Ernest Hemingway, but also captures Margaux’s interaction with the rest of her family, including her parents (who are both now dead) and her other sister Joan (also known as Muffet) who, after a lifetime struggle with mental illness, is now, we see later, in assisted living (after Mariel’s grown daughter chides her into visiting).

RunningFromCrazySun25

The Margaux we see in the kitchen of the old family home (which Mariel later tells us was torn down after her parents’ deaths) seems nothing like the woman with the blonde hair and big smile we see in a white 70s jumpsuit, singing alongside a piano, in archival tape from “The Mike Douglas” show (the host declares her a “star”). Instead, she seems to physically shrink in the presence of her mother and father and even her sister, whose manner reminded me of girls I knew in high school: fun to have at a party but with personas that were a cover for troubled lives. She even has the same hairstyle.

Mariel later reveals that her father sexually abused her sisters (she would share a bed with her mother to stay safe), and the family dynamic then seems to make more sense, especially to those of us who have stood by a partner who tried to make nice with abusive family members–and seen all the old roles come into play.

Kopple combines the vintage footage with gorgeous current shots of Mariel hiking in the wilds near her hometown. She says of her childhood, “I knew if I didn’t get outside I’d just want to cry.” We also see her in other wilderness, climbing steep cliffs (after fighting with her partner) and dipping herself in a river, all of which, along with her public speaking and outreach, seems like a catharsis to break with the past.

In one of the many scenes in which she speaks to the camera (some of which are a little too much like one-sided therapy sessions), Mariel says, “We were good WASPs, you know. You don’t speak about your problems,” but she does seem to be breaking the cycle as she tries to involve her adult daughters in this work and talk to them about the family’s history of mental illness (which the daughters have, to a lesser degree, also grappled with). She tells us, “They say in spirituality you’re done with something when it doesn’t affect you anymore. I’m not there yet.”

Interview With The Director, Barbara Kopple

I was able to talk by phone to the director Barbara Kopple (who not only has won two Academy Awards but has had a career that started in the ’70s and hasn’t stopped since) about the film a couple of weeks ago. We started by discussing the footage of Margaux. (The following was edited for concision and clarity.)

Barbara Kopple: She (Mariel) didn’t even know it existed.

Bitch Flicks: So how did you find that then?

Barbara Kopple: It was really pretty wild. We not only found the documentary which was an hour, we found 43 hours of Margaux material. I never told Mariel that we had it because I didn’t want her to feel, “My God, what do they have?” I wanted her to be free to really talk. She never knew it (documentary footage of Margaux, Joan and her parents) existed.

The way we found out about it is the sound person named Alan Barker whom I’ve known for years was in Ketchum for our first shoot. And he said, “You know Barbara when I first (started out) I was a camera person and I did some filming here in Ketchum with Margaux.”

I said (about the documentary), “Where is it?” He didn’t know. I said, “Did it ever come out?'”

He said, “I think they had a little hour thing. But if four people saw it, that was a lot. It was called Winner Take Nothing.”

We finally found some footage at an archival house in Minnesota the footage had been given to. When we called them they said, “My God, we have tons of it but nobody has ever asked for it. We’ll have to go and blow the dust off for you.”

We said,”We will pay anything to get a screening copy made.”

“Well that’s going to take a really long time” he said

(Well) when you do some, just send them to us,” so they sent it to us little by little and we would get these Fedex packages that would be like Christmas. (We were) so excited to see what was on them. I just knew that the film would have sort of a richer context because we had that. From that we were really able to step inside the Hemingway family. Otherwise it would be Mariel’s reflections which were extraordinary, but this way you saw. You saw Margaux with her father, interviewing him. You saw how she was treated. You saw how she played tennis with Joan. We thought that all of these wonderful, extraordinary things that made, for me at least, the piece so intimate and so real. And when I showed it to Mariel, I still hadn’t told her until we were in final cut, we were just about to lock it, and I just wanted to have her look at it, so she wouldn’t have any surprises.

(About the part of the film in which Margaux appears) Mariel just sat straight up in her seat, she was like, “Oh my God, this is the first time I’ve seen my parents on film. And I didn’t know if the kitchen was really yellow and blue. I didn’t know. I was just trying to remember. And there’s my mother sitting on the sink, exactly as I described it.”She said, “This is going to be so amazing for my girls to see.” And it was just, it was just wonderful…She didn’t even know it existed.

Bitch Flicks: The documentary does have in it, if the rest of us were having documentaries made about our lives, things we wouldn’t want included–when Mariel was fighting with her partner and the scene where her daughter scolds her a little bit about Muffet (Joan) and tells her she should visit. And I’m wondering if you and Mariel talked at all about those scenes afterward or even during…

Barbara Kopple: No.

Bitch Flicks:  So basically she just let you film whatever.

Barbara Kopple: She agreed. Yes. She just let me do the film, no holds barred. That was the deal. I mean she wanted to talk. She never said, “Don’t use that.”

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering if there have ever been times in your long career when people have said, “Don’t film that,” or “don’t show that” and what has been your policy about that?

Barbara Kopple: It’s happened, but things have been so little and so inconsequential to the story of the film. (She gave a couple of off-the-record examples which seemed really trivial, things that no one else watching would have any objection to or would even notice.) I think that little things that don’t hurt your story or do anything, of course you’ll take them out.

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering how much time you spent with Mariel and her family; was it in short spurts or an extended period?

Barbara Kopple: Short spurts. I wasn’t there every single day because every single day she was living her life, doing yoga or going for a walk or watching the sun rise. There’s only so many shots…

Bitch Flicks: I’m very interested in this framework that the film has, that Mariel said, “Just film me.”

Barbara Kopple: How it all happened was a really good friend of Mariel’s who worked at the OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) who said, “Hey Mariel, I think we should do a film about your life.”

Mariel said, “Let’s just make a reality series.”

And her friend said…”I have an idea. I want you to talk to this woman, Barbara Kopple.”

And I guess Mariel had heard my name and she said, “Well, OK, alright.”

I said, “I’d love to,” and then Mariel and I got together and we talked about three hours or more and she just promised that she would tell me whatever I needed to know. She said whatever I asked her she would answer to the best of her ability and not hold anything back. Because she felt that it was important to sort of see the light of day, the bad things in her life. She just did it and kept her promise.

Bitch Flicks: Were you surprised that Mariel’s daughters have never read Hemingway?

Barbara Kopple:. No, because I don’t think Mariel read very much of it until  she got married to Steve (her daughters’ father). I mean, it was a family that never really talked. They didn’t talk about books. They (Margaux and Mariel) were bullied because they went to the Hemingway school that was named after him. He had committed suicide. That was something that you just didn’t talk about. I wasn’t, but probably the audience who sees it (are surprised). It’s just who they were. People in the house were very dysfunctional–fights all the time. There wasn’t much time for fuzzy, cozy stuff. Her mother had cancer and Mariel took care of her mother. If you wanted to get close to the father you went fly-fishing or hunting with him.

Bitch Flicks: Is there anything else that you really would like to add?

Barbara Kopple: I guess if there was anything else I wanted to say, it was that I learned a lot. I learned that, in a sense, all of us are touched by mental illness, or by suicide, or we know somebody that is and it’s really important to talk about it. And that it’s really important to help each other and in the end I think what we really need to have is more love and more compassion for each other and that’s hugely important. I think that this film, if by getting out there, can convince people that they’re not alone and that there are people out there who love them and care about them and will help them, then we’ve done something very special.

Running From Crazy will be on Netflix starting on Nov. 25.  For more information go to Facebook.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGYqdTAxEk”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender