It’s an American tradition. A gaggle of indie musicians travel the country in a van and pull into small towns where they give the locals a taste of big city excitement before flitting off to their next gig in an American Legion Hall or smoky barroom in another town.
But in Ruth Leitman’s documentary “No One Asked You,” screening Oct. 28 at Tara Theatre, those surly city folk bringing a different point of view and raucous good times to rural communities are not the latest alternative music sensations, but a van full of fired-up women (and a few men).
Their mission: to support the abortion clinic workers in 16 battleground states who escort women past jeering throngs to get an abortion or the caregivers who offer abortions to women in need.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Ruthless Films
Credit: Photo courtesy of Ruthless Films
The documentary is the fifth film from former Atlanta filmmaker Leitman whose film “Alma” (1998) was a skin-crawling, true-life Southern Gothic set in Atlanta and centered on a deeply dysfunctional family. That positively reviewed film helped put the city on the independent film map when it screened at the prestigious 2000 Whitney Biennial in New York City.
In 2001, Leitman moved to Chicago where she has continued to create documentaries that often feature women’s stories. She followed “Alma” with “Lipstick & Dynamite,” about women’s wrestling pioneers, which premiered in 2004 at the Tribeca Festival. Leitman is now developing “Lipstick & Dynamite” into a fiction film, “The Pin-Down Girl.”
Her next documentary, “Tony and Janina’s American Wedding” (2010), about a Polish immigrant separated from her partner and returned to Poland after 18 years in America, was a stark look at the cruelties of America’s immigration policy. As Leitman wrote in HuffPost about her work: “As documentary filmmakers, we attempt to illuminate the injustices in the world in hope of helping create some small measure of change.”
In “No One Asked You,” that change agent is comedy firebrand and staunch abortion supporter Lizz Winstead. The co-creator of TV’s “The Daily Show” and an Air America radio co-host, Winstead now leads her merry band of ladies and some gents on adventures in the American heartland and on marches to Washington to advocate for reproductive rights.
Tattooed and pierced, with multicolored hair and delightfully snarky attitudes, Winstead’s crew of abortion rights activists, with their comic road show, suggest the traveling performers from an Ingmar Bergman or Fellini film. Like the USO rolling into town to lift the spirits of battle-hardened soldiers, the women comedians of Winstead’s Abortion Access Front perform on the abortion war’s front lines, showing up at clinics to offer support and words of encouragement.
“The work is really hard, for the folks who are at the front lines at these indie clinics,” said Leitman. “They are tireless. And, so, being able to bear witness to all of the levity and joy that the comics and the team brought was a medicine for the melancholy.”
Leitman met Winstead in 2012 when she was on a book tour for “Lizz Free or Die: Essays.” Leitman eventually proposed the idea of making a film together.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Ruthless Films
Credit: Photo courtesy of Ruthless Films
“The plan was to film them for a year during the first year of the Trump administration, and then we would wind down production. But what followed is that, as were winding down production after that first year in 2018, that’s exactly when all of the state bans and ‘fetal heartbeat’ laws started coming down the pike fast and furious. So at that point it was important to see this narrative through to some logical or illogical conclusion.
“Fortunately for us, Lizz and Abortion Access Front were about to embark on a 16-city USO-meets-Habitat-for-Humanity road tour through the Midwestern and Southern states,” Leitman added. “The tour began in Atlanta in 2017, and we filmed over seven years.”
Winstead and others note how, in the wake of all that legislation, the media dropped the ball on reporting about the chipping away of abortion rights, which kept many American women in the dark about how their lives were being impacted. But Leitman views her film as a way to set the record straight.
For Leitman, documentary films can be an agent of tremendous social change.
“What gives me hope is the new levels of participation in this election,” she said. “I hope that what people will take away from this film, especially in this election year, is that our democracy will be saved if we all participate.”
FILM PREVIEW
“No One Asked You”
7 p.m. Oct. 28, featuring a post-screening Q&A with filmmaker Ruth Leitman. $15. Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road NE, Atlanta. bit.ly/NOAY_ATL.
