At the Movies: Keeping Up with the Kunstlers
Poster courtesy of Kunstler Family
Demonstrators picketed their Greenwich Village home. Bullets came in the mail. Their father opened packages in the basement lest they contained explosives.
It was all part of growing up for the daughters of charismatic defense attorney William Kunstler, who became a magnet for protesters after he successfully represented El-Sayyid Nosair for the 1990 assassination of Israeli extremist politician Meir Kahane.
Kunstler’s wife, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, had begged him to turn down the case, to no avail. “We thought he was going to be killed,” remembers daughter Emily.
Nosair wasn’t Kunstler’s only unpopular client. He also took on near-universally reviled characters like Central Park rape suspect Yusef Salaam, Bronx cop-shooter Larry Davis and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima.
Now Emily, 31, a documentary filmmaker, and her 33-year-old sister Sarah, a lawyer, have made the biopic William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, which explores how their father went from representing clients fighting for social justice in the 1960s to taking on terrorists and assassins—sometimes with improbable success.
The sisters started talking about making a documentary in 2005, shortly after the 10th anniversary of their father’s death. Their goal was to gain a better understanding of their larger-than-life dad, whose absence they still keenly felt. “Before we made this film, our family didn’t talk about him too much because it was too painful,” Sarah says.
Continue reading “Keeping Up with the Kunstlers” online in the March ABA Journal.
