Director Ruth Leitman’s NO ONE ASKED YOU, focuses her camera on the day-to-day health care providers who risk their own safety in service to the women seeking an abortion. As well as the powerful political and religious interests seeking to deny them access to a constitutionally guaranteed right by the Roe v. Wade decision. A civil right to privacy that had stood for 50 years, lost after the US Supreme Court’s  Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. With the conservative movement conspiring to take away healthcare and bodily autonomy from all, “Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead brings us on the road with Abortion Access Front and her merry band of activists and comedians, that includes Sarah Silverman. Margaret Cho, Alex English, and Joyelle Johnson, as they crisscross the U.S. to support abortion clinics and providers. An urgent and humorous account of the serious work that this audacious group of activists are doing to battle misogyny and fight for reproductive rights in a divided country. Director Ruth Leitman (Lipstick & Dynomite, Hard Earned) joins us for a conversation on the challenges of filming on the road for nearly six years and getting to know the dedicated doctors, clinic workers and volunteers has given her reasons to be guardedly optimistic about the future of women’s access to the full range of reproductive health care.

Download MP3 Podcast | Open Player in New Window

For more go to: nooneaskedyoudoc.com

About the filmmaker – Ruth Leitman is an award-winning filmmaker recognized for highlighting social justice issues in feature documentaries over the past 25 years, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Paul Robeson Fund, TribeCa Film Institute, Fledgling Fund and Illinois Humanities Council. In 2016 she was named in British Film Institute, Sight and Sound Magazine’s The Female Gaze: 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women. In 2015, she directed for Kartemquin Films’ Al Jazeera America documentary series Hard Earned, which was nominated for an International Documentary Association Award (2015) and won an Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Journalism Award (2016). Premiering at Tribeca Film Festival and Hot Docs, Lipstick & Dynamite (2005) won the Documentary Storytelling Prize at Nantucket Film Festival; was broadcast on SHOWTIME and featured on Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition. Her immigration film Tony & Janina’s American Wedding (2010) premiered at Chicago International Film Festival won a jury prize as well as several social justice awards. Alma (1998) won the Documentary Feature Jury Prize at Hamptons Film Festival, screened at IDFA, SXSW, Director’s Guild of America and Whitney Biennial. Wildwood, NJ (1994) has enjoyed a second life as a viral film since 2009 and screened at Hot Docs, CHP:DOX and toured theatrically in the UK in 2015. Her early photography work was part of the current major exhibition, Underexposed: 100 years of Women Photographers at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2021.  Ruth is developing The Pin-Down Girl, a fiction feature film based on her documentary Lipstick & Dynamite about the pioneers of women’s wrestling. 

SOCIAL MEDIA

facebook.com/NoOneAskedYouDoc

facebook.com/lizzwinstead

twitter.com/NoOneAskedUDoc

twitter.com/lizzwinstead

twitter.com/ruthlessfilms

instagram.com/nooneaskedudoc

instagram.com/ruthlessfilms

instagram.com/lizzwinstead

“Humorous and urgent” – IndieWire

“A call to action as much as a profile in courage, No One Asked You inspires, even as it terrifies through its hard luck on where we are today.”– Christopher Reed, Hammer To Nail