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“A Tsunami of #metoo Accusations Ensued”: Directors Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman | Seeing Allred
Seeing Allred As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films?
Seeing Allred is a film with two threads: one biographical and the second a vérité unfolding of contemporary events, including the Cosby story and the Trump election. The biographical story, although complex and fascinating, was well behaved and stayed put. The contemporary thread was more chaotic and not neatly resolved. We thought we would be following Gloria from being a Hillary Clinton delegate to Clinton’s inauguration, which would have been a rousing conclusion to Gloria’s 40-year fight for women’s rights. Things didn’t work out that way. Instead, women came out with stories of alleged abuse by President Trump, Roy Moore and Harvey Weinstein, among others, and a tsunami of #metoo accusations ensued. We ended up with a much less predictable, and arguably more powerful ending to the film. As the unexpected happened, we felt as though we were catching Gloria Allred not at the end of her career, but rather at the beginning of an important new chapter in which her voice is urgently needed. Now more than ever.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 21 at 2:30pm — MARC]
