Anita Hill Documentary Tackles Racial And Gender Equality

Coming into the heat of the film festival season, Hamptons Take 2 refuses to be left in the dust—considering the documentary festival is still three months out.

As a teaser, the festival will screen “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” on Saturday, September 20, at 4 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, followed by a discussion and Q&A session. The 77-minute documentary by Academy Award-winning director Freida Lee Mock relives attorney and law professor Anita Hill’s sexual harassment experiences in the workplace, as special assistant and counsel to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In 1991, she testified against him, facing nine hours of intense questioning by 14 male U.S. senators during Mr. Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings.

“The challenge for me as a filmmaker,” Ms. Mock said in a statement, “is to tell a universal story of transformation and empowerment that is riveting, entertaining and amazing to a generation of women and men, too young to know, but who are benefiting by Anita Hill’s courage to ‘speak truth to power.’”

Ms. Hill, the youngest of 13 children growing up in rural Oklahoma, received her law degree from Yale University in 1980. She then worked in Washington D.C., first in the Department of Education, and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and served on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma College of Law. She is now a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University, and writes and lectures across the country on racial and gender equality issues.

“Freida Mock’s documentary unravels the impact of that lightning-rod moment on Anita Hill’s life,” film festival executive director Jacqui Lofaro said in a statement, “and the broader discussion of gender inequality and sexual harassment in America.”

Tickets are $15. For more information, call 725-9500 or visit ht2ff.com.