Daring Lives Dangerous Times

Synopsis

Eve Adams (born Ewa Kloczover) was a lesbian writer and anarchist who was an outspoken gay writer and immigrant Jew in an America that was homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. In 1927, she was deported from the U.S. for writing a book of stories titled ‘Lesbian Love.’ And yet before her deportation, she flourished in the bohemian world of New York’s Greenwich Village, and later in Montparnasse, the neighborhood that many of Paris’s artists and intellectuals frequented. “Preferring men’s clothes and women’s company,” The New York Times wrote, “Adams lived her life boldly at a time when the world considered the only decent way to live it was to keep it behind closed doors.”

Hella Olstein didn’t fit into the bourgeois conventionality of Basel, Switzerland, where her Polish Jewish family lived and thrived. She went to Paris to be a singer, finding her place in cafes and cabarets, where her songs of working-class life found a receptive audience. In 1933, Eve heard Hella sing and was smitten. They spent the next, and last, ten years of their lives together, dying in Auschwitz in December 1943.

About the Director

Lisa Fruchtman

Lisa Fruchtman is an Academy Award winning editor. Among her many projects as editor are Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, Children of a Lesser God, Godfather lll, The Doctor, My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Woodsman. For television she has edited HBO films such as Truman, Witness Protection and Normal. Awards, and honors include an OSCAR for The Right Stuff, Academy Award nominations for Godfather lll and Apocalypse Now, an Emmy nomination for Truman. Children of a Lesser God was nominated for Best Picture.

Rob Fruchtman

Rob Fruchtman is an award-winning documentary producer, director, and editor. He won the Documentary Director award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival for his feature film, Sister Helen, which aired on HBO and in over 30 countries. His Showtime documentary, Trust Me, follows Christian, Jewish and Muslim boys at an interfaith camp in North Carolina. In addition, he has won three Emmys for his work with PBS.

Together, Lisa and Rob directed and produced the critically acclaimed documentary Sweet Dreams, a story of hope and healing after the Rwandan genocide.

Artistic Statement

We are honored to bring Eve’s place in lesbian history out of the shadows into the light. Eve’s remarkable life as an activist in the ‘20’s in New York City is a story that has been buried and must be told.

Eve’s companion, Hella Olstein, was our cousin. Her disappearance was a haunting and enduring mystery in our family, so this story has great personal resonance. Since we have begun working on the project, its relevance to our own moment in history has become shockingly apparent. We are living now in our own dangerous times. Antisemitism is on the rise in the U.S. and Europe, millions of refugees are in exile amidst rising anti-immigrant sentiment, hard-won LGBTQ+ rights are under threat.

Daring Lives is a new creative challenge but continues in the vein of our ongoing work; examining issues of political and social consequence through an intimate character-driven lens.

At its core, Daring Lives is about otherness and exclusion and the virulent forms it can take given the right political context. Hella and Eve – Jews, immigrants, lesbians – were outsiders in several ways. The film explores the intersection of these overlapping “other” identities as well as the rise of authoritarianism and Fascism that did, and always will, seek to persecute those deemed “other.”

2027 marks the 100th anniversary of Eve’s deportation from the U.S. It is long past time to tell Eve’s story and to learn from it.