About Life or Liberty

Life or Liberty is a nonprofit multimedia project telling stories of resistance in immigrant communities. Our documentaries highlight the struggle against:

  • Demonization
  • Criminalization
  • Deportation
  • Detention
  • Family separation
  • Ethnic and racial profiling
More

What’s distinctive about the work of Life or Liberty:

  • A focus on resistance and solidarity, not passive victimization
  • Intimate human stories told with depth and context
  • Collaboration with subjects and organizations, to make our work useful in action and outreach campaigns
  • Innovation in connecting communities and historical struggles

Our distribution and outreach includes public television, film festivals, community screenings, and social media campaigns. Our projects make a long-term impact through educational and consumer distribution.

Our projects make a long-term impact through educational and consumer distribution.

Partners & Funders

Partners

Center for Constitutional Rights

CAIR

Committee for the Release of Farouk Abdel-Muhti

Desis Rising Up and Moving

The Tule Lake Committee

Japanese American Action Network

NAKASEC

Funders

The Open Society Institute

The National Parks Service

New York State Council on the Arts

The Fledgling Fund

The Puffin Foundation

Private donors – please support

Project History

Director Konrad Aderer founded Life or Liberty in the wake of 9/11, during the vast expansion of immigration enforcement that continues today. We began by producing short documentaries on immigrants targeted for detention and deportation, then expanded to feature documentaries and social media videos.

More

Director’s Statement

New York City, Fall of 2001: the wreckage of the World Trade Center was still smoldering. The acrid, toxic fumes from its wreckage filled the streets of Lower Manhattan. Despite the fear and anger the attack provoked as an immediate reaction, throughout the city there soon grew a sense of unity, of basic humanity overcoming political or ethnic divides…

More