'The Loving Story' traces couple's fight for love

Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving wanted to marry.

So they went to D.C., exchanged vows and came home to Caroline County.

Five weeks later, police broke into their bedroom at 2 in the morning, pointing flashlights in their faces.

They were arrested for being married to each other.

Richard, a white man, spent the night in jail. Mildred, a black woman, was held for five days.

Both were deemed felons for breaking the law that banned interracial marriage. The couple was told to leave the state for 25 years. They could come home to visit family, but not at the same time.

That was in 1958.

It unfolded in Central Point, a small community in Caroline County about 100 miles west of Charlottesville.

The Lovings moved to D.C. and had three children. But they longed to go home. So in 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to the attorney general. Robert F. Kennedy advised her to contact the American Civil Liberties Union.

Loving v. Virginia became the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned state miscegenation laws.

That was in 1967.

This evening, as part of the Virginia Film Festival, Peggy Fortune — the Lovings’ daughter — and Phil Hirschkop, one of the two lawyers who argued the case before the high court, will join filmmakers Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth James for a screening of the new documentary film “The Loving Story.” A panel discussion will follow the screening in UVa’s Nau Auditorium.

The film, which debuted at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April, will be broadcast next year on HBO. Tonight, however, festivalgoers get a rare chance to meet those who know the film and those who knew the Lovings.

Richard Loving died in a car accident in 1975. Mildred Loving never remarried. She passed away in 2008.

It was her obituary that caught Nancy Buirski’s attention.

Buirski, who had been a photo editor for the New York Times for 15 years, founded the Full Frame festival after moving to Durham, N.C. Her festival has drawn such notables as Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Michael Moore and Ken Burns. She has produced several works, but this film marks her debut as a director.

“That is when I decided to make the film,” she said. “I came across the obituary in the New York Times in 2008. I was really taken by their story … and I was really surprised that it hadn’t been made into a documentary film.”

As the founder of a festival about documentaries, Buirski was in a position to know. It also intrigued her because it happened in the South.

“I had not come across any other films on the subject,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know about the couple. They are better known in legal communities because their groundbreaking case changed the law on interracial marriages.”

Just Google the Lovings’ names and you will find more than 8.5 million results, including a Facebook page.

Buirski’s search led her to a book.

“Right after I read the obituary, I found a book written by Phyl Newbeck, ‘Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers,’ and that focused on their story.”

She found out that no one had approached the author about making a film based on the book.

“I optioned it,” she said. “It offered me a lot of the information that I needed, including a narrative of the events.”

From there she connected with the Lovings’ attorneys, Hirschkop and Bernard S. Cohen, and they, in turn, set up a meeting with the family. James, who produced and edited the documentary, interviewed Peggy Fortune for the film.

Both of Fortune’s brothers have passed away.

“I also came across some incredible archival footage,” Buirski said.

In the 1960s Hope Ryden had planned to make a film about the case. The footage of the family sat unseen for more than four decades. It changed the texture of Buirski’s project.

“It is like you are a fly on the wall, watching them,” she said.

With a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, Buirski and James were able to complete the project, and it was picked up by HBO, a pretty good coup for a first-time filmmaker.

Tonight “The Loving Story” will be shown in Nau Auditorium, part of UVa’s new South Lawn complex. More than 1,100 students will get their own special screening earlier at the Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center.