YOURS IN FREEDOM, BILL BAIRD

YOURS IN FREEDOM, BILL BAIRD

YOURS IN FREEDOM, BILL BAIRD

Director: Rebecca Cammisa
Documentary | Austria | 2023
104 min | Dolby 5.1

58th Hof International Film Festival
2024

Against all odds, Bill Baird secured an historic victory with his 1972 Supreme Court case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, which granted all single Americans access to birth control. The case not only strengthened women’s reproductive self-determination, it also liberated them from the stigma of being single.

In the years that followed, Bill warned Americans that the religious right was working to overturn Roe v. Wade. However, Bill’s highly confrontational approach led to a long list of enemies, including the Catholic Church and prominent figures in the Women’s Movement. As a result, his decades of activism were ignored, forgotten, or mostly excluded from history. Today, at age 91, Baird lives in total obscurity; that is until Jada Portillo, a 16-year-old Latina girl from Arkansas, rediscovers him for a National History Day competition. This generational “contraceptive buddy film” chronicles Bill Baird’s historical fights for reproductive rights and follows Jada as her generation now faces the total erosion of their personal liberties.

With Bill Baird, Dianna Portillo, Jada Portillo, Jeffrey Yoakum, Professor Linda McClain, Sue Katz

Cinematography Claudia Raschke, Editing Sebastian Jonies, Sonja, Lesowsky-List, Music Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, Amelia Allen, Starr Parodi, Executive Production Dinah Czezik-Müller, Kabir Sehgal, Klaus T. Steindl, Production Sarah Nörenberg, Walter Köhler, Wolfgang Knöpfler