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Big-time Hollywood director makes a movie about Stonewall

As the action-movie auteur behind films like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and White House Down, Roland Emmerich tends to spend his days on set managing explosions and working with tricky special effects. But when Emmerich recently changed gears to make the intimate, low-budget gay-rights drama Stonewall, he found himself faced with a whole new set of problems. "It was a huge challenge to make this movie, and if I had not absolutely wanted it, it would not have happened," he told Vulture this week.

Emmerich's new film tells the story of the 1969 Stonewall riots — where a long-oppressed queer community finally fought back against a police raid at New York's Stonewall Inn — and when it comes out in theaters on September 25 (you can check out the exclusive poster teasing that release date below), it will do so at a pivotal point for gay rights and visibility. On the one hand, this has been a historic year for progress thanks to last month's gay-marriage decision at the Supreme Court, and queer representation is at an all-time high both in real life and in the arts. At the same time, though, we're coming up on the tenth anniversary of Brokeback Mountain, and it's still as difficult as ever to get a gay movie financed, let alone a period piece dealing with a pivotal incident that isn't taught in most high-school history books.

Read entire article at Vulture