During the recent Jewish Film Festival, Beyond Chron talked with Emily and Sarah Kunstler, the filmmakers behind the new documentary “William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe” and daughters of the legendary attorney.

Beyond Chron (BC): The younger generation sees [the Sixties] as something not relevant to the present day. What would be your reaction?

Emily Kunstler (EK): A lot of young activists today idealize the anti-war movement of the Sixties because it seemed clear, cohesive, and organized.

A lot of people thinks it’s numbers, that it’s bodies in the streets. But there were 3,000 people in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Due to the dramatic press, it became this enormous event. At the start of the [Iraq] War, there were 500,000 people in the streets of New York at the first protest. Maybe it’s oversaturation of the media, maybe it’s the way it’s recorded.

Sarah Kunstler (SK): We definitely wanted it to seem like a continuity, that the activism that inspired those times is alive today. This is part of a legacy, both Emily and my legacy as children of a parent who was involved in social justice movements and all of our legacies as people who inherited this country and these problems to stand up.

BC: Your film seemed to play down your ambivalence between the social justice work your late father did in the Sixties and his later cases in the Eighties. Why did you decide to make it less a personal documentary and more an objective documentary?

SK: Emily and I don’t agree we played down that ambivalence. That ambivalence is the core of this movie. It’s what sends us on this journey into looking at his life. It’s not understanding the continuity between who he told us he was and who he seemed to be. It’s both a personal and a historical documentary. It’s not the type of personal documentary where you see melodrama happening on screen. But we are doing that psychological work by making this movie and coming to the conclusions we came to.

It was a struggle trying to figure out how to put ourselves into the movie. Were we making a personal film? Were we making a historical film? The conclusion we came to was that there was no way to make this movie without acknowledging who we are. We were not the people to make a straight historical film. Unlike other films where children investigate their parents, we had more political unresolved issues than personal ones.

EK: It’s also that he passed away. As adults, we have a more nuanced view of the work that he did. But the film is from our perspective as adolescents, when you’re consumed with ambivalence and these simplistic black and white questions and you want things to make sense. Being teenagers was our starting point because we never had the chance to have an adult relationship with our father. Every moment we confronted him was in the film.

BC: Mentioning you were Kunstler’s daughters opened doors for you. Were people reticent with you because you were William Kunstler’s daughters?

EK: It opened doors and also closed doors. For example, the surviving prosecutor in the Chicago trial’s given interviews to many other people. But he didn’t want to talk with the daughters of his dead foe and speak ill of him, because that’s all he had to say and that was frustrating.

We wanted this to be an honest story from our perspective. To be honest and respectful of the people we were interviewing, we felt we had to be there. I’m sure there were things people didn’t tell us because we were his daughters. But I’m also sure there were things people told us because we were his daughters. That was a compromise we were willing to make.

SK: Early on, we were really worried that people were going to sugarcoat the story for us. We spent a lot of time figuring out how to ask the right questions, strategizing how to get the good dirt. Ultimately, what we realized is that we weren’t making a Jerry Springer-esque type of movie. Who might have held grudges?

EK: Who smoked a joint with him in a public bathroom?

SK: That kind of sensationalism didn’t really matter. To focus on those points would have weakened the overall story. It’s the kind of stuff that people don’t like sharing about people who are gone. As children, we want to hear the salacious stuff. I think the film’s better for not going down that road.

BC: One surprising interview was with the Chicago 8 juror, the Republican woman who changed her mind about the government as a result of participating in the trial. How did you find her?

EK: Randomly. We had a list of Chicago jurors who we thought were still alive. The woman you’re speaking about is named Jean Fritz. We looked up Jean Fritzes in the phone book and just started calling them one by one until we got the one who said “Yes, I’m the Jean Fritz who was on the jury.”

Jean Fritz’s transformation really goes to the center of our father’s belief in this country. He had an interesting career in that he worked within the jury system to change the jury system. He thought if you could get in front of twelve people that they could see the truth and be persuaded. He believed in humanity, that people given the right information would do the right thing.

The film in large part is a story of transformation. Sarah and my transformation, Jean Fritz’s transformation … It doesn’t matter what life experience you had, there’s still the potential for transformation, to become inspired and socially active in their communities.

BC: That’s very empowering, given the cynicism in certain leftist circles [that] participating in the system somehow compromises your moral purity. It sounds like your father rejected that idea. Is that pretty much the point you were making?

EK: Yes. Otherwise, it becomes this intellectual pursuit. You can try to imagine a different world and who would be in control. All political people should certainly have a bigger plan. On the ground, you still have to be active and work to create a better world than the world we live in currently. I think that’s one of the reasons why Bill didn’t identify with any particular political group or party. Where his efforts were most needed were to empower people around him on an individual level and hope to have a ripple effect on the greater society.

SK: Bill thought change happened both in the streets and the courtroom. Both parts of that were indispensable. As a society, we do not move forward without the street movement. The courts are always latecomers to that process. No great decision in the civil rights movement would have happened were it not for the movement on the ground.

BC: I liked the mention of the David statue that was in your father’s study. Let’s say that David decided to take a shot at Goliath, missed, and wound up getting killed by the giant as a result of it. What would you say to a results oriented person that [David’s] actions were still worth doing even if he failed?

EK: What Bill did say to people was that there were more failures than victories in this world, especially if you’re working for social justice. He told other lawyers who came to him dismayed that they should keep their eye on the war. There are battles lost and won, but there’s this greater ideal in this war and consider that. He would also say that there were no failures. As soon as he lost a case, he would say “great, this gives us good stuff for the appeal.” There was always a next step.

In order to be our father, he had to be this optimist. Sarah and I rarely remembered a day when he felt depressed. He was profoundly affected by the tragedy that surrounded him, but in the sense that it strengthened his determination.

BC: You made an enigmatic statement , “we loved our father’s extravagant greatness, but we also suffered his frailty.” Could you elaborate?

SK: We had a myth and we had a human being. It’s an interesting experience to grow up with both. It’s not that he tried to be an icon around the house. He tried to exist on a human level and sometimes it was actually hard to get him down to normal size. But we got to experience the flesh and blood person: a father, a person who got angry, a person who was afraid, a person who made breakfast. But I don’t think it’s a unique experience that it happens to just someone who’s in the public eye. Maybe it was more extreme in our case.

(“William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe” plays for at least one week at the Opera Plaza Theatre starting November 20.)