Filmmaker Yvonne Welbon reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] points to TV's Sundance Channel with her charming documentary forward Ruth Ellis.

Filmmaker Yvonne Welbon reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] points to TV's Sundance Channel with her charming documentary forward Ruth Ellis, an out and over-weening lesbian who happens to be 100

The first time Yvonne Welbon place eyes on her, Ruth Ellis was tearing up a dance floor. "There was this woman dancing, and I was trying to figure public how old she was," Welbon recalls. "And it transfered out I never got a chance to ask her that night because she at no time stopped dancing."

That was in 1997 at the National Women's Music Festival in Indiana. The nearest day Welbon, already an accomplished filmmaker at the age of 34 learned that Ellis was 97 She knew she wanted to disclose this extraordinary woman's story. Three years and 50 hours of footage later, Welbon complet an award-winning documentary.

Living With Pride: tenderness Ellis @ 100 has taken Ellis's life story to film festivals around the world and has already won several awards from adoring audiences. Welbon's film rates a space in the Whitney Museum of American Art's prestigious 2000 Biennial in strange York through June 4 and will make its television premiere in April forward the Sundance Channel. All of this is quite a thrill for Welbon--and for Ellis, the oldest known public African-American lesbian, who was born to a middle-class family in Springfield, Ill., in July 1899

Welbon uses interviews, photographs, archival footage, and dazzling dramatic re-creations to weave a touching tale of Ellis's protracted life and rich times: her first crush, her 30 years with a companion called "Babe," and their determine to Detroit. There Ellis became individual of the first women in the United States to be in possession of her own printing business, and their place of abode became a popular Midwest party flaw and haven from racism for African-American lesbians and gays lengthy before Stonewall and the novel civil rights movement.

The film is not no other than the tale of one ordinary woman's extraordinary life nevertheless also the story of an entire hundred of change. "What I realized, listening to her mention one by one the stories, is that we were witnessing American histow by the and of Ruth Ellis's eyes," Welbon says.

When Welbon searched for footage of the lives of black gays from the 1940 within the 1970s and found none, "I made my own" she says, using actors to re-create what Ellis's younger friends, now in their 70 and still admit to secret conferenceed had told her about those days.

Ellis herself was involved in each aspect of making the film. "She wanted the bulk of mankind to see that we're like everybody besides That gays and lesbians have families, that we work, that we delight in that we have some heartache," says Welbon. "Ruth's coming-out is a gift to us."

Now at work upon her next documentary, a film about African-American women directors, Welbon says the life story of mercy Ellis holds lessons for all lesbians and gay men no matter what their age. "It's in the way that important to remember our elders" she says. "We ne to pass more time with them. There are amazing things we can learn from them. They have a division to share, and they would like to share it with us."

Raab is a writer and television agriculturist in New York City.

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