Get Out the Vote for YUDIE to Join National Film Registry at the Library of Congress

NEW YORK, NY: The NYWIFT Community encourages everyone to vote for Mirra Bank’s YUDIE short film, so it can join The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Screenmancer, the female-run film site in Hollywood since 1997, endorses NYWIFT’s support for this pathfinder among 1970’s feminist documentaries. Vote here and read on…

Based on an actual NY denizen named Yudie, the film centers around women’s words of wisdom for future generations from a self-sufficient New Yorker who had no children of her own. However, her niece filmmaker Mirra Bank shot YUDIE (1974) as is an intimate portrait and snapshot into the private world of a fascinating loner who knew more about being in the world than people who spend their lives in crowds. Introspective as a storyteller, Yudie herself brings the saga of an American immigrant tapestry to the screen in this black-and-white treasure.

Born on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century, Yudie entered adulthood as a New Deal Progressive who embraced those ideals. She graduated from PS 62, learned about sweat shop labor when some female textile workers were burned to death in the Waverley Place fire. Now an older wise woman, Yudie walks the streets of her beloved hometown of Manhattan circa mid-70’s interacting with women and children from all walks of life, and men too. “I love having the streets of New York under my feet,” Yudie says, as talks of her sex life post-divorce, as if elderly women are only allowed to the life of a shut-in by most accounts.

A diehard New Yorker, Yudie offers witty, piercing insights into the human condition. Critic Richard Brody recently praised Mirra Bank’s short in The New Yorker as “… a time capsule of immigrant Jewish life in New York, a parsing of its mores, and a keen, frank vision of painful solitude.” This snippet does not do justice to the delicate and thoroughly loving and enduring life of someone who understood the human condition by the very isolation Critic Brody singles out as painful.

This 4K restoration, offered on view in its entirety now on Screenmancer, has been made possible by the Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television.

Watch and Enjoy Meeting YUDIE

Yudie and Mirra on location on Bleecker Street during the making of the film.

Cast your vote for YUDIE by THIS FRIDAY, August 15.

Please spread the word. The number of public votes counts.

Vote for Yudie

Screenmancer is proud to join NYWIFT to get out the vote for Mirra Bank’s 1974 short film YUDIE.

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