Emmy-winning director on new documentary with Bellingham ties ahead of Cascadia Festival

Ask director Greta Schiller what she thought of the audience at last month’s Bellingham premier of her newest work, the 39-minute documentary “Love Letters,” and you’ll get an enthusiastic response.

“Oh God, are you kidding?” Schiller said in a phone call with the Bellingham Herald. “It was just incredible.”

That was, in large part, because Catharine Stimpson, one half of the couple at the center of the film, was born and raised in Bellingham.

“There were 650 people in the audience and a lot of them remembered her mother, who was a community activist who helped save downtown, and her father apparently was a very well-known doctor in town,” Schiller said.

Next week, Schiller is bringing “Love Letters” back to town for the Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival, which will be in Bellingham from Thursday, April 25 through Sunday the 28th, before an online version starts on May 2. Schiller’s film will be shown that Sunday at 2:00 p.m at the Pickford Film Center. “Love Letters” tells the story of Stimpson, a feminist scholar, and her partner Elizabeth Wood, as Wood fought for custody of her four children.

“So basically, these two women met and fell in love in New York City, and one of them was Australian,” Schiller said. “She knew she was a lesbian but she was married to a man that had four kids in Australia.”

After Wood divorced her then-husband, he filed for sole custody of their children.

“The thing is, at that time, lesbians routinely lost their children,” Schiller said. “In fact, most lesbians who had children from a heterosexual union didn’t even attempt to fight for [custody of] their children because they knew they would lose.”

Instead, Wood decided to fight, and she won.

Schiller is no stranger to making films about gay and lesbian love stories or landmark moments in the fight for LGBTQ rights. Her first feature film, “Before Stonewall,” was nominated for the Jury Grand Prize at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival, won an Emmy in 1987, and is included in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. More recently, her work has tackled topics spanning from ecological restoration to creationism and student labor rights.

“I sort of followed the same pattern since I began, which is I get a subject that I’m interested in,” Schiller said. “Then I develop the idea, and I raise the funds, make the movie and sell it.”

But when she heard her longtime friends Wood and Stimpson talking about their custody battle, she knew she had to make a film about it.

“One day, they told me about the custody case and I was like, ‘Oh wow,’” Schiller said. “A love story, 47 years together, fighting for the kids, raising them — I thought that warranted a film.”