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Glass Biography • Elly & Henry on Amazon
Elly & Henry
1939: Elly Glass, a Viennese woman, traveled to Berlin in an effort to free her Jewish husband from Buchenwald. Elly, only 23 years old, obtained an audience with a high-ranking Gestapo officer. By the end of that meeting the officer said, “Your husband will be released in ten days”. And he was.
The couple fled Vienna and came to the United States. With no money, no English, and no friends to help them, they overcame extreme obstacles. In less than a year they had worked their way out of the rat and bedbug infested boarding house they were forced to live in.
Later in 1948 Chicago, Henry Glass became the architect of one of the first solar houses in America, an early advocate for “living green,” and a legendary industrial designer. His design innovations included use of alternative materials such as plastics and Masonite and were often collapsible to a volume so small it could hardly be imagined.
These are the designers that brought us from the 20th century and into the 21st. This is their story – a portrait of a pioneering inventor and the woman who made everything possible throughout their 66 years together.
Leslie Streit Biography
Leslie Streit is a writer, director, and producer. Her 2005 film, “God Wears My Underwear,” a documentary-narrative hybrid, was screened at several international festivals, including XXVII Festival Internazionale Cinema e Donne, DNA Film Festival in Toronto (Best Short Film), WCFF, M-SPIFF, NYIIFVF, and IFFS. Streit’s short films have been screened at international festivals and broadcast on Bay Area PBS, OffLine, World News Network, and IFC online. Honors include Selected Artist at the Hong Kong Arts Biennial 2002 and several screenplay awards.
In 1996 Streit co-produced the historic “VD2001,” one of the first serials to appear on the web, which was based on her live multimedia production about vampires in cyberspace. This toured to the Edinburgh Festival with support from Intel Corp and several other Silicon Valley corporations. She recently completed “Elly and Henry” (2014), a feature documentary, and is now working on Season 4 of the online comedy cooking series “The Evil Auntie Show,” an Official Honoree of the 2009 Webby Awards and a Silver W3 Award winner, currently distributed by Blinkx. Also completed in 2014 was “How to Make A Ballet Dancer,” an interactive DVD project sponsored by ODC Theater, San Francisco.
Leslie Streit Filmography
The Fountain (1988, 3 min). Collaboration with videographer Bill Birkley.
Broadcast: KTEH Channel 54 (PBS)
Messengers (1994, 2 min), The Visitor (1994, 3 min), Sacrifice (1996, 3 min)
Broadcast: Eastern Standard Time Productions, Offline, Unquote TV
Screening: Foothill Festival of the Arts, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Tokyo Video Festival
VD 2001/Vampires in Cyberspace (1995-97). The first serial/episodic on the web.
Press: “Vampires in Cyberspace,” VN, Aug/Sept 1996
Awards: Lycos Top 5% Award, Netguide 4 Star Gold Award
Screening: The Digital Media Project (Cleveland Performance Art Festival), Artists Television Access (San Francisco), Southern Illinois University/Digital Media Lab
Hospital of the Mind (1998, 8 min)
Screening: Digital Catapult Film Festival sponsored by Levi Strauss (San Francisco)
Online venues: The Sync, ifilm.com, 01films.com, Alwaysi.com, ipepperview.com (Paris)
Distribution: Interdvd, dvd-rom magazine, Tel Aviv
Eyewitness (1999, 5 min)
Screening: Independent Exposure (Seattle), ATA (San Francisco), Women Make Waves (Taipei, Taiwan), Video Screening Project (Hong Kong), Hong Kong Arts Biennale 2002 (Hong Kong)
Online venues: Filmfilm.com, Always Independent Film Festival, ipepperview.com (Paris)
Broadcast: DUTV (Philadelphia), KTEH-Channel 54 (Bay Area PBS)
Distribution: Blackchair Productions (Seattle), OffLine (Ithaca, New York), The Screening Room (Amherst, New York), Interdvd dvd-rom magazine (Tel Aviv)
Lavinia’s Dream (1999, 3 min)
Screening: Il Coreografo Elettronico (Naples, Italy), ATA (San Francisco), 2le Festival International Du Film Independant (Brussels, Belgium)
Online venues: ifilm
God Wears My Underwear (2005, 45 min). This film ties the Jewish Holocaust in the 1940s to the genocide in Tibet in the 1950s.
Press: Colin Covert @ Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Apr 2006), Alex Deleon @ FilmFestivals.com (Apr 2006), Aaron Blair @ Afterword (Jan 2006)
Screening: DNA Film Festival, (Toronto), XXVII Festival Internazionale Cinema e Donne (Firenze, Italy), New York International Independent Film & Video Festival, 24th Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, Napa-Sonoma Wine Country Film Festival
Awards: Best Short Film Award – DNA Film Festival
Distribution: M&L Banks (New York), iTunes via Gigaplex, Internet Archive
Evil Auntie’s Quick & Sexy Family Cooking (The Evil Auntie Show) (2008-present)
Distribution (series): Blinkx
Press: TMC News.com, OnLineVideoWatch, Just an Online Minute, Examiner.com, Behind the Burner
Awards: Official Honoree at the 13th Webby Awards, Silver W3 Award
Screenings: Roma Independent Film Festival (Rome), Trannyfest (San Francisco), XXXI Edizione del Festival Internazionale di Cinema e Donne (Firenze, Italy)
Online venues: IFC Media Labs, Featured on FoodTube
Broadcast: i2TV (Bay Area)
Two Short Pieces by Augusta Moore (2009, 4 min). Collaboration with choreographer Augusta Moore.
How to Make a Ballet Dancer (2014, 83 min). Interactive DVD exploring the teachings of 83-year-old Maria Vegh, her principles of movement based on the science of Kinesiology and told via 62 short videos and animations.
Elly and Henry (2014, 74 min). Feature documentary. Holocaust survivors build the first solar house in America and are early advocates for living and designing “green”.
Distribution: Espresso TV (worldwide)