Ruth Leitman has directed six feature length documentary films including “Alma,” which won the Documentary Feature Jury Prize at the Hamptons Film Festival. Her other credits include “Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling,” “Wildwood, NJ,” and “Hard Earned.” She is currently in development on the 1950’s fiction feature film, “The Pin-Down Girl,” about the pioneers of women’s wrestling.

“Lady Parts Justice in the New World Order” will premiere at the 2018 DOC NYC film festival on November 11.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

RL: “Lady Parts Justice in the New World Order” is a docu-series that follows Lizz Winstead — co-creator of “The Daily Show” — and her organizations Lady Part Justice and Lady Parts Justice League during the two years between the 2016 Presidential and midterm election in 2018.

Part road movie, part character and human rights advocacy story, “Lady Parts Justice League,” led by Winstead, barnstorms the country with a boots-on-the-ground strategy to support abortion providers and reproductive rights, using comedy as the ultimate weapon to mobilize voters towards the 2018 elections. Exposing the bullshit of wrongdoer politicians with intersectionality and the best comics working today, Lizz and her team will stop at nothing to protect bodily autonomy for all.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

RL: After the election of Donald Trump, I was gutted and I was searching for my own personal way to counteract what had just happened. I care deeply about a woman’s right to choose. My great-grandmother died from complications of a pre-Roe self induced abortion, leaving my grandmother and her two siblings motherless. I narrowly escaped with my life at the hands of an abusive boyfriend as a teenager when I had an abortion. I felt I needed to turn my camera to amplify the work that Lizz and her team were doing to protect reproductive rights access for all, which had been under attack and was about to get worse under the new regime.

The narrative around reproductive rights access had become a bit stagnant and misunderstood. I was interested in bringing attention to the work that Lady Parts Justice League was doing to support independent clinics and their staff across the country where the vast majority of abortions are performed. And I wanted to tell the story through these characters who are at once brilliant and informed on the issues state-by-state, but were also using comedy as a way to bring people together on the issue and making the fight for justice — while quite taxing — also fun. 

Now more than ever since 1973, we are going to need that humor and irreverence to win back our rights to women’s healthcare, something we shouldn’t even need to be fighting for– again!

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

RL: I want people, especially white women, to understand that we have a responsibility to protect and defend the reproductive rights of all women, especially low income and women of color. I want women to get behind this issue as if their lives depend on it, because they do.

I am hoping to ignite women — and men — who care about, but have been passive on this issue, by using comedy and outrage through the storytelling in this series and its subjects, to give people permission to join and make a commitment to this important fight.

I want people to leave the theater and plan gatherings with friends and family when the episodes premiere on TV or SVOD and continue the conversation to work together locally on the reproductive rights issues in their home states.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

RL: The funding was tough. This project in large part is a road story. Our subjects are tireless and we followed them across the country and back with very little funding. It was also challenging as it often is to make films about people you truly admire while also needing to keep a necessary ethical distance. I make films about people who I would like to know or be friends with in real life, but you can’t. So in this case, early crew members wanted to hang out with the comics — also the characters of the series. That boundary is critical and a deal breaker for me.

I do greatly admire my subjects, but I wasn’t interested in making a fluff-piece. That doesn’t serve anyone: the subjects, the issue, the story, myself as a filmmaker, or the audience. This project in particular challenged me in that way because let’s face it, they are famous and they are funny, but they are so much more than that. This is also a story about women who modified their work in the film and entertainment industry for the pursuit of social justice.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

RL: Financing is always tough in every film I have ever made. This was one that I felt might be a bit easier because the issue was so timely and there is so much star power in it. But it was also the situation where on November 7, 2016 I was adapting a fiction feature from of my wrestling documentary “Lipstick & Dynamite,” and then by November 9, I knew I had to make this project and temporarily put the wrestling aside. So in the beginning, we had zero funds for this project. We forged ahead with developing it. We did a development deal with Kartemquin Films, who I have known and worked with over the years.

Kartemquin has been a great support to our efforts with feedback and story development. We filmed and traveled as cheaply as possible. Then we made a demo, a sizzle, and selected scenes and string-outs and sent them to the traditional grants funding sources and honestly got very few of them.

What we were doing was frankly outside of how many grant sources fund if not in the issue of reproductive rights, certainly our approach to this serious subject using irreverent comedy as the weapon. Many doc funders don’t fund series whereas the broadcasters and streaming outlets are looking for series. Most of them are not set up for rapid response funding to issues that need to be documented quickly, which is contrary to the way vérité documentary filmmakers work — on the ground as things unfold. We are still looking for smart undaunted funders to help us complete the remaining episodes in post.

The majority of our funding has come from crowdfunding, individual donors, and tremendous support and resources from Columbia College Chicago where I am on the faculty. So, how we got this funded is also a question of how we got it made which is the thing that makes me cry whenever I think about it. We got the film made with an all-women crew — largely unpaid or deferred — who traveled with me across the country, many of them were my students or recent alum from Columbia who were all determined to bring this into reality. They knew their rights were at stake.

This film was funded through sheer passion from the women, and men, involved. As my producer Rachel Rozycki said when she came aboard early this year and saw how little funding we had, “This is the ‘Field of Dreams’ for Repro Rights Advocacy.” If we build it, viewers, financiers, programmers, broadcasters, etc. will come. I think this premiere at DOC NYC, where we’ll be screening two one-half hour episodes, will hopefully be the beginning of this.

From a business perspective, this project is low risk for finishing and distribution funding to complete post on the rest of the episodes. They are mapped out and ready to go.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

RL: I’ve always loved listening to conversations and began taking photographs as a teenager. I went to the University of the Arts for Photography and Film. I studied both, but when I graduated from college and moved to Atlanta I made a living as a photographer. I did a lot magazine work and album covers, which lead to music videos. My work was music, fashion and portrait focused and infused with a gritty social documentary feel. I was working on a series of images of teen girls which took me to Wildwood, New Jersey where I made my first feature documentary “Wildwood, NJ,” a Super 8 sync sound film made before non-linear digital editing.

I completed the film in 1994 and it has a had an interesting second life since 2009 when it went viral on YouTube. From being appropriated in a Lana Del Rey video to the runways of Milan, I have also become very interested in what happens to our work once we put it out into the universe. “Wildwood, NJ” may be my first film, but it is also how people find me now.

Quite simply, what inspired me to make films was that I wanted the audience to hear what the women and girls in my images had to say. Although I photographed many celebrities from Queen Latifah, George Clinton, Ringo Starr, Isaac Hayes, The Black Crowes, and more, it was my social documentary work, that listens to underrepresented people, many whose lives have been shaped by a lack of opportunity, but who are strong and resilient — those are the people I was inspired to document.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

RL: Best Advice: Listen

Worst Advice: Don’t Listen

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

RL: Don’t ask permission. Just make your work. Find people who share the passion for the subject and aesthetic and make it happen. Surround yourself with people who can contribute and bring talent to the table that are not your strengths. Honor those talents in others.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

RL: Documentary: Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County, USA.” This film inspired me to become a documentary filmmaker with a passion for social justice. This work like no other shows us what can happen when there is a camera present and a woman behind that camera and the possibility for social change.

Fiction: Ida Lupino’s “The Bigamist.” I am inspired by the life and work of Lupino, a trailblazer for women who had the audacity to create strong, non-traditional female characters and make sure they reached an audience in a system run by men.

W&H: Hollywood and the global film industry are in the midst of undergoing a major transformation. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

RL: This is just the beginning of the transfer of shame from women and those who have been assaulted and harassed to the assaulter and harasser. But this is just the start. We must look outside of our own industry into the lives of young women. I am the mother of a 20-year-old and surrounded by many young women my daughter’s age, through her friends and my film students, who voted for the first time in 2016. Every day that Trump is in office is a trigger for most women in America. If anything, we talk about social justice and rape culture in the work we do and I hardly know a single young woman who has not faced some kind of harassment or sexual assault in their young life. 

It is so ingrained in our culture to shame women that the culture shift will take some time. I credit organizations like Lady Parts Justice, Reproaction, and #ShoutYourAbortion among others — along with the beloved progressive media and numerous journalists — for helping in those efforts for change.

We are far from where we need to be. I am inspired by my female students who after the Weinstein case became public began posting anti-sexual harassment notices on their sets along with the hotline number. 

Women need to empower and truly help others in the industry. Every time we say we are the only woman who does X, we undermine ourselves as filmmakers. Hopefully this is actually a transformation, and not a moment or a phase. We will not truly be transformed as women directors, producers, and industry leaders until we have control of more of the money. That is something that men are not going to be willing to give up any time soon. But women are tired of waiting.