Greta Schiller

Greta Schiller is an American film director and producer, best known for the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community and the 1995 documentary Paris Was a Woman.

Career

Her 1976 film Greta's Girls is, following Barbara Hammer, one of the first independent short films to focus on lesbians.

She had a part in directing the 1981 documentary Greetings from Washington, D.C. which details the first important LGBT march for gay rights, held in 1979. The film combines interviews with multiple forms of media that shows the history of gays and lesbians during the early 20th century to the late 1960s. Before Stonewall was the first gay or lesbian film to be funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In 1985, Schiller and Andrea Weiss founded Jezebel Productions, a nonprofit women's film production company based in New York City. Schiller and Weiss were strongly influenced by both the New Left movement and the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Paris Was a Woman, about creative lesbians in 1920s Paris, was a labor of love for the two filmmakers, taking 5 years to produce and breaking house records. Woman of the Wolf (1994), The Man Who Drove with Mandela (1998), I Live At Ground Zero (2002), In 2020, she directed The Land of Azaba, the first feature documentary on the subject of ecological restoration. Set in one of the world's first "hot spots" for increasing and maintaining bio-diversity, Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Western Spain, the film premiered at the Valladolid International Film Festival and won "Best Cinematography" in the Mystic Film Festival.

Reception The Advocate said that Greta Schiller is "gifted".

Time Out New York wrote that Paris Was a Woman might cause viewers to "want to leave their spouse and move to Paris.

The Atlantic Journal wrote that International Sweethearts of Rhythm "makes you glad documentaries were invented."

In 2019, Schiller's film Before Stonewall was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Filmography Greta's Girls (1978) Greetings from Washington, D.C. (1981) Before Stonewall (1984) International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986) Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin' Women (1989) Maxine Sullivan: Love to Be In Love (1990) Woman of the Wolf (1994) Paris Was a Woman (1996) The Man Who Drove with Mandela (1998) Seed of Sarah (1998) Escape To Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story (2000) (directed by Andrea Weiss) I Live at Ground Zero (2002) U.N. Fever (2008) No Dinosaurs in Heaven (2010) The Marion Lake Story: Defeating the Mighty Phragmite (2014) Bones of Contention (2017) The Land of Azaba (2020) The Five Demands (2023)

Personal life Schiller received the US/UK Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Film and grants from multiple organisations.