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Filmmaker Nancy Buirski
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Director, producer and curator Nancy Buirski is the founder and was the director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival for ten years. She produced five collections of Full Frame shorts with Docurama and a library collection of feature-length documentaries, The Katrina Experience. She was executive producer of TED's Pangea Day Film Content. Buirski is a producer of Time Piece, the innovative cross-cultural anthology of Turkish and American shorts (directors, Albert Maysles, Alex Gibney, Nathanial Khan, Edet Belzberg and Sam Pollard, among others), Harlem Woodstock (director, Alex Gibney) and Althea (director, Rex Miller). She is next directing the documentary Tanaquil Le Clercq: Afternoon of a Faun and is producing a fiction version of the Lovings' story. Prior to her work in film, she was a documentary photographer, writing and photographing "Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America," and the foreign picture editor at The New York Times.

Describing her debut documentary The Loving Story, she explains, "The film is an unusual telling of a civil rights story. Though often overlooked among the pantheon of civil rights struggles, Mildred and Richard Lovings' quest to live together as husband and wife in the state of Virginia was a pivotal one. A white man and a part-black, part-Rappahannock woman were in love and did not understand why their marriage was a criminal offense in the eyes of state. Their effort to make this right — to not live in shame or in exile — is universal, metaphorically reminding us of oppressed and exiled people everywhere. The Lovings were banished from their home for their commitment to each other, and they fought long and hard to return to it, to love each other within the bosom of their family.

"We were fortunate to unearth authentic footage, photographs and interviews from the period, which have been woven into the tales recounted by those who were there at the time or were close to the Lovings. The film takes viewers into the actual time and place as their story unfolds through their own voices and that of others present. Never-before-seen footage and photographs of this very private couple reveal who the Lovings really were, and what it was actually like to marry as a mixed-race couple in the Jim Crow South.

"White supremacy groups are growing in the U.S. – in the very communities that perpetuated and maintained anti-miscegenation laws up to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling. While we've elected the first mixed-race president, we also recently witnessed a Louisiana Justice of the Peace refusing to marry a mixed-race couple. Anti-miscegenation sentiments are at the heart of racial segregation and apparently still alive today. The struggle for same-sex marriage has important civil rights parallels — both address basic human rights. We believe this nuanced character study, this story of courage and strength, will ignite interest in the tale's morality and create a safe place for people of all beliefs to gather and explore the timeless issues within the film."

Icarus Films is proud to distribute Nancy Buirski's film The Loving Story.

  • The Loving Story - Oscar-shortlist selection, this documentary is the definitive account of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage.

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