Coming to Cornell Cinema on Sept. 27: filmmaker Abby Ginzberg '71 and her award-winning documentary that profiles a black federal judge's life and career.

Ginzberg will introduce her film, "Soul of Justice: Thelton Henderson's American Journey," at 7:15 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. The film has earned several honors, including the 2006 American Bar Association Silver Gavel.

Henderson, a government civil rights attorney in the early 1960s, was appointed a federal judge by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, becoming one of the first African-Americans to hold such a post. In his nearly 30-year career on the bench, he was witness to some of the era's most pressing, divided issues, and many of his controversial decisions are considered landmarks in progressive law. He presided over cases concerning affirmative action; the 1970s black prison movement; prison guard brutality; and protests against tuna fisheries' slaughter of dolphins.

As Ginzberg -- herself a lawyer -- got to know Henderson professionally, she became convinced that "his story would resonate with the public, even though most people don't recognize his name."

"In telling Thelton Henderson's story, I'm telling the story of race relations over the last 50 years," Ginzberg says. "We live in a time when there are very few inspirational people in our lives. [This current] generation didn't have a Martin Luther King or a Bobby Kennedy."

Ginzberg majored in history and political science at Cornell. She earned a law degree in 1975 from the University of California-Hastings and taught at UC-Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School (which Henderson had attended). She began making films in 1983 while working for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Washington. Her films -- including a five-part series on bias and the award-winning "Cracking the Habit" and "recovering lives, uncovering hope" -- combine storytelling and in-depth issues reporting.

"The stories that move me the most are the individual stories that reflect American traditions and the life and times they lived through," says Ginzberg, who lectures at law schools on using film as a form of public interest advocacy.

"The challenge for the documentarian is to find the footage that will help advance the story," she says. "In making the Henderson film, I didn't have a single photograph of him in the South."

In the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, she unearthed about 30 seconds of film of Henderson inspecting a jail. "And I stretched every frame of that footage, because [it] showed who he was at that time. I felt like I struck gold."

Ginzberg traces Henderson's life with historical footage and testimony from his friends and admirers (and foes, including former Republican Congressman and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay) and shows him as someone who struggled to enter the mainstream and became one of the most powerful men in California.

"He's completely self-made. He didn't know a lawyer probably before he went to law school," Ginzberg says. "He thought he was going to be an athlete. Then he got injured, and he had to reinvent himself. He did not want to go back to Watts. Through his own tenacity, he was able to hunker down and get good grades."

When he entered law school in 1959, he was one of only two black students at Boalt. "He knew he would have to work harder than everybody," Ginzberg says. "And that's been true his whole life. It's not that he writes the most winning opinions, it's that his are the most thorough and the hardest to reverse."

Learning from history, she says, "can inspire people to work for justice in their own lives."

Her visit is co-sponsored by Cornell Law School. For more information, visit http://www.soulofjustice.org. For Cornell Cinema, call (607) 255-3522 or visit http://cinema.cornell.edu.