"Leona's Sister Gerri", a new documentary that we should all buy/rent...

[cascadiance]

I just posted this thread in GD, but its getting dwarfed with all of the other big topics today. If enough of us bought this film right now while it is just in its initial release, perhaps it becoming a "bestseller" like Jesus Camp did might help elevate the issues with this latest Supreme Court issue. A number of house parties now with your local progressive clubs might also be helpful too.

If you buy it and want to put it to good use afterward, perhaps send it to your congressman, or a supreme court member, or one of the presidential candidates.

GD thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=714932&mesg_id=714932

Cheap place to buy the DVD:
http://www.deepdiscount.com/viewproduct.htm?productId=8592904

Site with the following description of it.
http://www.dvdempire.com/Exec/v4_item.asp?item_id=1307596

We never knew theistory, or we didn't until Leona's Sister Gerri...searingly effective, forceful, intimate, unpretentious, devastating." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times

The tragic and grisly photograph--a woman on a motel floor, dead after an illegal abortion--stirred a nation and inflamed a movement. Now, Leona's Sister Gerri tells the powerful and thought-provoking story of the anonymous woman behind the image and how she became an extraordinary icon for the ever-controversial abortion issue. Through tears and laughter, Gerri Santoro's tale of desperation in the days before legal abortion "unfolds in an intimate, unpretentious style" (The New York Times) as told by her family and friends.

Gerri was a tree-climbing kid who grew up on the family farm, then a spirited adolescent, a young wife, and later the devoted mother of two little girls. But she was also a battered wife who suffered years of abuse before eventually leaving her husband and returning to Connecticut. There Gerri became pregnant by a lover who agreed to perform an abortion and then left her when the operation went awry. Nine years later, in 1973, Ms. magazine published the heart-wrenching photo, which even now cries out from protest placards as a potent symbol in the struggle for a woman's right to choose.

Directed by Jane Gillooly, rousing and all-too-real, Leona's Sister Gerri cuts through the leaden rhetoric of one of America's most divisive issues to pay respects to an extraordinary woman and her tale.

[MountainLaurel]

1. Thanks for posting

I will forward this to my coworker who orders videos for our library.

[iverglas]

2. I don't know whether you know ...

Gerri Santoro's daughter is with us here at DU. I've known the basics of Gerri's story for some years, and seen the awful photo many times, and I found meeting her daughter here a ... startling, moving, slightly overwhelming ... experience. I can't think of Gerri now without thinking of her, and while that always saddens me, and I would never presume to speak for someone not able to speak for herself, I think she does Gerri proud.

[cascadiance]

3. Someone earlier mentioned that in the other thread I linked to here.

I wasn't aware of that before today. I saw this DVD earlier (I collect a lot of documentaries these days) come up on a "new release chart" some weeks back and it sounded like a very compelling story, and I'd ordered it even before this Supreme Court decision came down a week ago. I'd love to know her daughter through conversations here too. Just got the DVD in the mail today, so I haven't had a chance to watch it just yet.

I just hope that the newer court decisions that keep going down don't ever bring us back to those days where women have to endure this sort of thing again. I'd like to think that the story on this DVD and her family's help here would be a good way to prevent those days from happening again and tainting other families' lives again in the future.

Do you know if the timing of the release of this film was timed intentionally to coincide with the liklihood of a supreme court ruling on that case, or do you think that it came out at the end of last month just coincidence?

[CBHagman]

4. PBS ran the documentary a few years back.

I recall the write-up in the papers about the documentary, and of course I had to watch it. Utterly devastating.

What you should also be aware of is that that grim photograph of Gerri Santoro also appears in Our Bodies, Ourselves.