Home Of The Brave
Documentary (75 min.)

Home Of The Brave is the dramatic, on-the-edge-of-your-seat story about the only white woman murdered in the Civil Rights Movement in America and why we don’t know who she is. Told through the eyes of her children, the film follows the on-going struggle of the family to survive the consequences of their mothers heroism and the mystery behind her killing. Viola Liuzzo was a 39 year old wife and mother of five, who heard the call from Martin Luther King Jr to join with him and thousands of others in Selma, Alabama for the march on Montgomery in ’65. But shortly after the historic Voting Rights March had ended, she was shot in the head and killed by a car full of Klansmen, while driving on a lone highway.

Liuzzo’s death came at a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, and is attributed by historians of the era as providing the final piece of leverage that won Johnson approval of the Voter’s Rights Act in Congress, which forever changed the political landscape of America.

So why do we not know the story of Viola Liuzzo? The reasons are complex, and won’t be found in history books. Immediately following her murder, Liuzzo became the target of a smear campaign, mounted by J Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as a means of diverting attention from the fact that a key FBI informant was in the car with Liuzzo’s killers. This discrediting of her name—mostly based on her gender and wholly unfounded—succeeded in erasing Viola Liuzzo from the nation’s cultural memory.

Parallel to the Civil Rights struggle for which Viola lost her life is the present-day journey of her five children. Their lines have been torn apart by what they see as a betrayal of their government, and after decades of fighting, they’ve each resigned themselves to their own form of refuge.

Home Of The Brave is a living history that links the personal and the political, the past and present and has a resonance to our whole world today.

“A serenly powerful, handcrafted film that navigates into a place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called “the tangled discords of our nation” – Variety

“Di Florio has seamlessly woven together the strands of past tragedy and contemporary ramifications into a film that is stingingly personal and universal at the same time” – The Hollywood Reporter