Documentary financing increasingly runs on the marquee executive producer — a recognizable name attached above the title to tell audiences and buyers that a small, issue-driven film deserves attention it could not otherwise command. Which name does the signaling matters. Julianna Margulies spent the defining stretch of her career, from ‘ER’ through ‘The Good Wife,’ playing women who learn to move through institutions built by and for men. Her decision to executive produce ‘Sister Senators’ reads less like a star’s charity attachment than a piece of thematic casting.

As Deadline first reported, the Emmy winner has boarded Emily Harrold’s documentary about the only five women in South Carolina’s 46-seat State Senate — Republicans Katrina Shealy, Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson, Democrat Margie Bright Matthews and independent Mia McLeod — who set their parties aside to face down the chamber’s male supermajority.

Their alliance hardened after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. In 2023 the five mounted a marathon filibuster against a near-total abortion ban, a piece of cross-aisle defiance unusual enough that the John F. Kennedy Library handed them its Profile in Courage Award. Harrold, an NYU-trained filmmaker who divides her time between Orangeburg and New York, works in a fly-on-the-wall register, using the daily grind of the Statehouse as the backdrop for an improbable sisterhood.

What gives the project its charge is the bill the women were handed afterward. The three Republicans were censured by their own party and, in the 2024 primaries, turned out of office — Shealy, Senn and Gustafson all losing to challengers who ran against their vote. ‘Sister Senators’ inherits that ending, becoming a record of political courage that the ballot box, in the short term, punished.

‘At a moment when women’s rights are being trampled upon, we need examples of powerful women willing to put people before partisan politics,’ Margulies said of her involvement. She joins a team led by Harrold and producer Robin Hessman, alongside executive producers Ruth Ann Harnisch, Grace Cowan, Monika Parekh and Kelly Keenan Trumpbour. The film is in early post-production, with no release date set.

The coalition the documentary preserves no longer exists in the room where it was built. Three of its five members are gone from the Senate — the bipartisan bloc that briefly held a South Carolina abortion ban at bay now surviving, for the moment, only on screen.

Tags: Emily Harrold, Julianna Margulies, Sister Senators, documentary, production-start, women's rights