Long before Kathryn Bigelow struck a blow for women filmmakers by capturing the Best Director Oscar, Omaha native Joan Micklin Silver made her own Hollywood inroads as a feminist cinema pioneer. With her 1975 directorial debut Hester Street she joined a mere handful of women directors then. Just completing the film and getting it released was a major feat. The low budget, black-and-white independent told a period Jewish immigrant story partly in Yiddish with English subtitles. "With great effort we made the film," says Silver. Her script adapted the Abraham Cahan novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. As the eldest daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the story held deep reverberations for Silver, who says she gloried in her father's tales "of what it was like in Russia and what it was like coming over and his first banana." Hester Street allowed her to commemorate on screen the immigrant experience she sprang from. "I cared a lot about the ties I had to that world," she once told a reporter. That the film became a sensation was a small miracle. "One thing I thought as I was making the movie, 'Well, who knows if I'll ever get to make another film,' and I say that because things were pretty dire for women directors and I really wanted to make one that would count for my family. The immigrant experience was a very big part of my family's experience." Silver feels the film strikes a chord with viewers because "it tells an immigrant story in an interesting, believable and honest way." Last November Hester Street's impact was confirmed when the National Film Preservation Board included it among 25 new selections in the National Film Registry, a U.S. Library of Congress-curated archive of significant American movies. Its citation notes the film's been "praised for its accuracy of detail and sensitivity to the challenges immigrants faced during their acculturation process." The honor took Silver by surprise. "I was really pleased, I had no expectation, and I was delighted to be on the same list with a John Ford movie (The Iron Horse) and a Charlie Chaplain movie (The Kid). It's pretty exciting," the longtime Manhattan resident says. The recognition is doubly satisfying given the difficulty of getting the movie made and released. She recalls one Hollywood executive who rejected the project suggested she change the story to Italians. When no studio would finance the story of early 20th century Eastern Jewish immigrants, her husband Ray Silver, who worked in real estate, raised the $350,000 to do it. He also produced the picture and made sure it got seen. "Certainly he's the hero of my story," she says.

read more: Joan Micklin Silver’s Classic ‘Hester Street’ Included in National Film Registry