“The Way the Janes Approached This, One Woman at a Time, Helped 11,000 Women Get Safe Abortion Care”: Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes on their Human Rights Watch Film Festival closing night doc The Janes

The Janes, which closes this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in-person May 26, followed by an HBO premiere June 8, is one woefully prescient walk down pre-Roe memory lane. Directed by Academy Award nominee Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water, which also nabbed the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award back in 2008) and Emmy nominee Emma Pildes (Spielberg, which the debut director likewise produced for HBO), the doc tells the illicit tale of the titular underground network of college-age activists who defied the law (and male expectations) to provide women in Chicago with safe, shame-free abortions. Until, perhaps inevitably, they got busted in a headline-grabbing raid (by the homicide arm of the CPD no less). And then, in the most Hollywood of twists, found the tide of history that they’d helped turn was actually on their side. Pildes and Lessin (whose accolade-laden bio also includes “two Emmy nominations, one arrest, and a lifetime ban from Disneyland” for the late-90s TV series The Awful Truth) found time just prior to their doc’s Human Rights Film Festival launch to give us the scoop on combining contemporary interviews with archival footage from a clandestine past; resulting in an unnerving portrait of a possibly hellish future (at least, as usual, for the young, BIPOC and poor). (The Human Rights Watch Film Festival streams nationwide May 20-26 at The IFC Center. All ticket purchases help subsidize the cost of free tickets – set aside on a first come first-served basis – as HRWFF does “not want the cost of entry to be a barrier for participation in the festival.”)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.