Irene Lusztig is a British-American nonfiction filmmaker and artist. Her body of work explores historical memory, archival materials, and feminist historiography.
Career
Lusztig's debut feature film Reconstruction, released in 2001, tells the story of her Romanian maternal grandmother Monica Sevianu, who was sentenced to life in prison for taking part in the Ioanid Gang bank heist in 1959. The film explores issues of Romanian Communist history, re-enactment and authoritarian politics through the personal lens of Lusztig's family history. The film had its international premiere in the First Appearances program at IDFA in Amsterdam, was shown in MoMA's Doc Fortnight screening program, and was broadcast on ARTE. It was praised as "a film of ambition and scope" by the Boston Phoenix and hailed as "an example of personal documentary at its best" by Variety. In 2003, Filmmaker Magazine named Lusztig one of their 25 new faces of indie film. Her 2013 feature length filmThe Motherhood Archives combines over 100 educational archival films to explore the ideologically mediated histories of childbirth in the 20th century. Her most recent feature length film, Yours in Sisterhood, explores the unpublished letters sent to Ms. Magazine in the 1970s. This film examines history and second-wave feminism in the context of the most recent wave of feminist politics. It premiered at the 2018 Berlinale Forum and was nominated for a Teddy Award for Best Documentary/Essay Film. Filmed between 2015-2017, Yours in Sisterhood uses "embodied listening" techniques to invite contemporary women across the United States to read and reflect on letters to the editor of Ms. written between 1972 and 1980. The film was critically praised by The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Hyperallergic. Lusztig's films have screened around the world, including in the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, the Pacific Film Archive, BFI London Film Festival, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, Melbourne International Film Festival, and RIDM Montréal. She was a 2010-11 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study David and Roberta Logie Fellow and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow. Lusztig is currently Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches filmmaking.
Filmography
2018 Yours in Sisterhood / HD video / 101 min. / distributed by Women Make Movies 2016 Forty Years / HD video / 12 min. 2014 Maternity Test / HD video / 14 min. 2013 The Motherhood Archives / 16mm, HD video, archival materials / 90 min. video / distributed by Women Make Movies 2005 The Samantha Smith Project / DV, Super 8, archival materials / 51 min. video 2001 Reconstruction / DV, super 8, archival materials / 90 min. video / distributed by Women Make Movies 1997 For Beijing with Love and Squalor / Hi8 video / 58 min.
