Oak Park documentarian Ruth Leitman has always trained her camera on women: Wildwood, NJ (1994) looked at teenage girls, Alma (1998) chronicled a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, and her best known project, Lipstick & Dynamite (2004), explored the postwar heyday of “lady wrestlers.” Her forthcoming documentary Tony & Janina’s American Wedding, screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center twice in October, is her first ever about a man, and it wasn’t a film she ever foresaw making.
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Leitman met the Wasilewski family of Schiller Park—Tony, Janina, and their young son, Brian—in June 2007, when the immigration-reform group Dreams Across America hired her to make a short piece about them. “I basically met them on the worst day of their lives, when they found out she was being deported,” Leitman says. The resulting short, Losing Janina, has logged more than 10,000 views on YouTube, and it inspired her to pursue the Wasilewskis’ story in a full-length documentary. “I felt I had the responsibility to see through what had just happened to them, to some logical, or illogical, conclusion.” She began shooting, fund-raising as she went along, and enlisted her husband, Steve Dixon, as coproducer and composer. She also pulled in two Kartemquin Films vets, Gordon Quinn and Leslie Simmer, as story consultant and editor, respectively.
Tony also lobbied Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, then his congressional representatives, though in the film Leitman suggests that their support waned as the 2008 elections approached. “I think I do give Obama a little bit of a hard time,” she admits, “because he didn’t deal with immigration reform until he really got pressed to the wall.” But Tony found common cause with Gutierrez, who Leitman portrays as a tireless fighter for immigrant rights.
Fri 10/22 and Wed 10/27, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2600
