Spring 2009 Class Notes

Warm Reception for ‘Frozen River’
Profile: Courtney Hunt ’89 and Donald Harwood ’81

These days, Courtney Hunt’s life has been a series of festivals. Since her somber film, “Frozen River,” won the 2008 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, she’s been hopping from one festival to the next. In November, she jet-setted to events in Greece, Morocco, Paris and Stockholm. In February, she strolled down the red carpet in Los Angeles with an Oscar nomination for original screenplay and a nod to Melissa Leo, the film’s star, for best actress.

Hunt, who also holds an MFA from Columbia University’s film division, wrote and directed the searing film — her first feature-length project. It depicts the hardscrabble lives of one white and one Mohawk woman living along the frozen edges of the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. Fighting against poverty and for their children, the women become unlikely allies as they smuggle illegal immigrants in the trunk of a car from Canada into the United States. Steering her battered Dodge Spirit across the treacherous, icy border in the dark days before a Christmas she has no money to celebrate, the white woman wonders aloud why anyone would go to such lengths to immigrate here.

Hunt’s husband, Donald Harwood ’81, is executive producer of the film. A partner in the New York firm Itkowitz & Harwood, he practices complex commercial litigation — that is when he’s not raising capital for “Frozen River” or negotiating and obtaining intellectual property rights associated with the film’s production and distribution.

Released in August, the film had its longest run at the West Newton (Massachusetts) Cinema. “The support of the film in Boston has been quite remarkable,” Harwood said.

PHOTO: JORY SUTTON/FROZEN RIVER PRODUCTIONS, LLC

Turning Tables
Profile: Isaac Borenstein ’75

Last fall marked the end of an era when Judge Isaac Borenstein ’75, a 22-year-veteran of the Massachusetts Courts (16 years on the Superior Court and six on the Lawrence District Court), took off his black robe and hung out a shingle at the Boston firm Rudolph Friedmann. There, “Judge B,” as he’s known, is busy building a practice doing civil litigation, criminal defense and general law.

Private practice is the next chapter in a legal career that’s seen Borenstein, 58, as a law professor, public interest lawyer and judge. “It’s indescribable what being a judge meant to me. I feel a sadness in stepping down, as you would with any huge decision, but I’m ready for the next challenge, to dedicate myself to issues in the public interest, pro bono cases ...,” says Borenstein, who continues to serve as a long-time, popular lecturer at the School of Law. “And I’m excited by the challenge of helping to run a business — something I’m doing for the first time in my life.”

In the two-plus decades he spent on the bench, Borenstein presided over his share of high-profile trials, most famous perhaps were motions for new trials for Violet Amirault and her daughter, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, in the Fells Acres case. Borenstein granted the motions, a courageous decision in the face of popular opposition.

“Fells Acres certainly stand outs as one case that was very important, but I tried to keep in mind that whether the case was so-called ‘big’ or ‘small,’ it was very important to those in court that day,” Borenstein says.

The move from judge to private practice is unusual; for many, the bench is a capstone career, the last step before retirement. But Borenstein is no stranger to choosing the less-traveled path. In 1973, he left nationally ranked Emory University Law School to enroll at Northeastern — five short years after the law school reopened.

“I was drawn by the program’s uniqueness and the school’s social bent,” Borenstein recalls. “People may have thought I was crazy, but then, as now, I’ve lived such a fulfilling, happy life by doing what feels like the right thing … to me.”

And it’s that same attitude no doubt that will sustain Judge B as he approaches the bench from the other side.

PHOTO: DAVID LEIFER