A documentary film that opened in New York on Friday was meant to be a loving paean to Bella Abzug, the feminist icon who represented the city in Congress during the 1970s, with interviews from a parade of prominent women, from Hillary Clinton to Barbra Streisand, who call her an inspiration to their own careers.
But in recent weeks, a bitter public dispute between Ms. Abzug’s daughter Liz Abzug and the filmmaker, Jeff L. Lieberman, has complicated what was supposed to be a celebration of the congresswoman’s life and legacy.
Liz Abzug has accused Mr. Lieberman of cutting her out of the project after agreeing to make her an executive producer in exchange for access to private archival material and interviews with prominent friends and associates of her mother, who died in 1998.
The film’s producers say they did not cut Ms. Abzug out of the project, but that she decided to end her involvement with it three years ago. Ms. Abzug rejects that account.
Bella Abzug was a larger-than-life feminist and influential lawmaker known for straight-talking advocacy for liberal causes and for her campaign slogan, versions of which remain popular sayings on political buttons and bumper stickers to this day: “This woman’s place is in the House — the House of Representatives.”
In an interview, Liz Abzug said the way Mr. Lieberman made the film about her mother “was against everything she stood for” during her life.
“This man took advantage of us, and my mother would have been outraged,” said Ms. Abzug. “He treated me — as Bella’s daughter, as an executive producer and as a woman — like crap. I think he is trying to promote himself and make a name for himself and be in control.”
Mr. Lieberman did not respond to requests for comment, but another producer on the film, Jamila C. Fairley, disputed Ms. Abzug’s claims in a statement. She called Ms. Abzug’s accusations “deeply unfortunate and unnecessary” and said she hoped they would “not distract from the picture’s tribute to her mother.”
“We are grateful for Ms. Abzug’s early assistance on this project, but we do need to unequivocally correct the record that she has created,” said Ms. Fairley.
Ms. Fairley said that in 2020 Ms. Abzug “demanded that neither she nor the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute be credited” in the film, and said “she would not engage with us any further in connection with the film.”
“We have honored Ms. Abzug’s request,” Ms. Fairley said.
Ms. Abzug said she did not walk out.
“He’s the one who stopped communicating with me,” she said. “I did not quit the project.”
Ms. Abzug said she asked to have her name and interviews she and her sister, Eve Abzug, gave removed from the film because she believed Mr. Lieberman was not abiding by the contract.
Bella Abzug, who was the first Jewish woman elected to the House of Representatives, served from 1971 to 1977 and represented parts of Manhattan and the Bronx.
During her tenure, she opposed the Vietnam War, introduced the first federal gay rights bill, and co-sponsored legislation that made it possible for women to get credit cards and other loans in their own names.
She unsuccessfully ran for the United States Senate in 1976 and for mayor of New York City in 1977, and remained active in public life until her death.
The documentary about her life, “Bella!,” opened on Friday at Village East Cinema in New York and will open this week at Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles.
Ken Sunshine, a public relations executive who represents Ms. Streisand and also worked for Bella Abzug in the 1970s, said the conflict around the film had dismayed many who knew the Abzug family.
“Bella deserves to be memorialized in many ways and it is too bad there is this dispute about this film,” said Mr. Sunshine. “It is all very sad.”
In an interview, Liz Abzug said Mr. Lieberman first approached her about the film in 2017.
In a contract between Ms. Abzug and Mr. Lieberman, which was viewed by The New York Times, the filmmaker agreed to credit her as an executive producer and creative consultant, to “meaningfully consult” with her over the final version of the film, and to share 5 percent of its net revenue with the nonprofit organization she founded in her mother’s name in 2005, the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute.
In exchange, Ms. Abzug gave the filmmaker access to her mother’s personal papers, as well as to family photos and videos, and agreed to “use good faith efforts to introduce Filmmaker to the friends, family, and colleagues of” her mother.
Ms. Abzug said she conducted a number of the interviews herself, including those with Mrs. Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Lily Tomlin and Shirley MacLaine — “Shirley, who I know like an aunt,” she said — as well as the talk show host Phil Donahue and David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York.
Ms. Abzug said her relationship with Mr. Lieberman began to break down after the celebrity interviews were finished and the archival material was handed over.
“In terms of research, I went through the archive here at CBS, NBC, at ABC,” he sad. “There was a lot of great material that had not been seen in 50 years that I dug up.”
“You had home movies as well, right?” asked the interviewer, Marcia Kramer.
“Home movies from the family that were really eye-opening,” he replied. “To see Bella as a young woman in her 20s and 30s, and with her husband, that was really important to the film too.”
Last October, the film won the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize, which provides unfinished documentaries with funding for final production and distribution costs. In a statement last week, Ms. Fairley said she hoped the Abzug family would enjoy the finished product.
“We are hopeful that Ms. Abzug and her family will view the film recognizing it as a vital, overdue portrait of Congresswoman Bella Abzug’s contributions to American and world history,” said Ms. Fairley.
Ms. Abzug said in the interview she had not seen a cut of the film in years and that she believed the promised revenue sharing with her nonprofit organization would not happen.
She and her family were also not invited to the film’s New York premiere, she said. Ms. Fairley did not respond to a question about whether they were invited.
“Why wasn’t my family invited to this premiere?” Ms. Abzug said. “Who does that?”
She first aired her concerns in July in a post on Facebook that has collected several hundred comments. Since then, she has posted at least twice more.
In one post, she shared a gallery of pictures of herself posing with interview subjects — including Ms. MacLaine and Ms. Clinton — as they held a poster for the film. She “interviewed each one of them on site jointly with the filmmaker,” she wrote, “in my capacity as Executive Producer of the film.”
In another post, she said she regretted allowing Mr. Lieberman, whom she described as a “basically unknown documentary filmmaker with limited experience,” to make a film about her mother.
She said she believed “he misrepresented himself to me as authentic” in his desire to honor her mother’s legacy, but “he has shown himself to be someone who I certainly DO NOT believe is a feminist!!!”
But in the interview, Ms. Abzug said she was “not out for any retribution” because she still felt a sense of ownership over the film.
She said that when people asked her whether they should see it, it was hard for her to figure out how to answer.
“I say, ‘Look, I haven’t seen the film, but I believe the film has really good stuff in it,’” she said. “I wanted this to happen in the first place and I worked on it, but on the other hand you cannot treat people the way he has treated us.”