They grew up in a home like no other -- where bullets arrived in the mail and where their father went to the basement to open packages he feared could contain explosives.

That was life for the daughters of the late civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, whose clients ranged from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman to John Gotti. Now his daughters are telling their stories -- and bringing him back to life on film for a new generation.

The documentary, "William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe," by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, is being released at theaters in New York on Friday and Los Angeles this month.

The sisters made the 85-minute film to tell their father's story through the eyes of young girls who sometimes could not understand his representation of society's most despised.

On the playground, the girls weren't always sure how to answer the taunts of schoolmates who wanted to know why their father was representing villains accused of shooting at police officers or raping a Central Park jogger or committing terrorism.

"We were obsessed. We wanted them to be innocent. We didn't know how to fight those playground battles for him," Emily, 31, said during a recent interview.

Sarah, 33, agreed, citing

By his death in September 1995, Kunstler's booming baritone voice and unmanaged hair were expected in New York courthouses whenever the most unsavory of clients needed a lawyer willing to take up a seemingly lost cause. A surprising amount of the time, Kunstler ended up winning.

William Moses Kunstler was an ordinary New York City lawyer in the 1950s, living in the suburbs with a wife and two daughters.

His life turned dramatically when he traveled to the South in 1960 to join the civil rights movement as a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. The film portrays a man whose childhood home had black servants being transformed into a legal icon of civil rights struggles.

He became famous when he represented anti-war protesters arrested at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, a group of activists who became known as the Chicago 8. Before the trial was over, Kunstler's hair was long and he was sentenced to more than 40 months in prison for contempt of court for his courtroom behavior.