DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969 mark a defining turning point in the fight for LGBT rights in the United States. Specifically, they mark the point when fight became the right word for the movement, when gay people in America finally got fed up with routine victimization at the hands of police and government, and said they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. It was one of those routine exercises, the attempted closing of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the West Village in New York City, that sparked a riot and the four decades of gay rights activism that have followed. Stonewall is the reason most cities’ Pride weekends take place in June to this day; those few days of defiance truly inspired a revolution, turning the tide in a country where 49 of 50 states had, at the time, completely outlawed homosexuality.
Two previous documentaries have been made around the events at Stonewall, further illustrating its position as a marker, as one was called Before Stonewall, and the other After Stonewall. Both of those films concentrate on the gay rights movement in the years before and after the event; Stonewall Uprising is the first to turn its focus on the event itself. Given the lack of firsthand visual materials from the event itself — the media largely ignored the violence even as it was going on over the course of a number of days — it’s unsurprising that it’s taken someone this long to tackle the event itself. Absent a visual record, filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner find as many eyewitnesses to the riots as they can, both within the gay community and the police department, in order to create as complete an account as they can of one of those handful of events that really did alter the course of history.
