Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival Presents 'The Loving Story'

As a fall event
preceding its sixth annual festival on December 6-8, the Hamptons Take 2
Documentary Film Festival, under executive director Jacqui Lofaro of

Bridgehampton, presents the award-winning documentary “The Loving Story” on

Sunday, September 22, 4 p.m. at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor.

“The Loving Story”
(77 min.) by director Nancy Buirski is the definitive story of Richard Loving
and Mildred Jeter, a mixed racial couple (Loving is white, Jeter is African
American and Cherokee Native American), who married in Washington D.C. in 1958
and returned to their home state of Virginia, only to be arrested and to have
their marriage declared illegal.

Their case went
all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia that “under the Constitution, the freedom to marry
or not to marry a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot
be infringed by the state.”

The decision made
anti-miscegenation laws illegal. The issue, as part of the civil rights struggle,
has also been cited during the recent commemoration of the 50th
anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, and in the ongoing
struggle for same-sex marriage equality in the United States.

Said Ms. Lofaro: “The
story of the Lovings, the interracial couple in the film who fight for the
legal recognition of their love, is a powerful and timely story, as challenges
to marriage equality continue in this country and around the world.”

The director Nancy
Buirski, who lives in New York City, is the founder and former 10-year director
of the noted Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina.

Present for a
post-film panel discussion will be co-producer Patti Romeu and film consultant
and New York University history professor Dr. Martha Hodes.

“The Loving Story”
received the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award in
January 2013; the George Foster Peabody Award in May 2013; and has been
nominated for three Emmy Awards, for Best Documentary, Outstanding Historical
Programming, and Outstanding Editing, in the 34th annual News and
Documentary Emmy Awards, to be presented on October 1.