Filmmakers

ROMAS SLEZAS Obituary

Romas was born on December 31, 1938 and passed away on Monday, April 15, 2019. Romas was a resident of Boston, Massachusetts at the time of passing. But the evening courses in film that he took at Boston University while a Tufts undergraduate steered him toward a career in documentary film. In Slezas's words, during the shooting of Watermen, he and Fisher "worked casually, very gradually winning the confidence of their subjects, never contriving action or pre-arranging interviews." Another of his films, Progress, Pork Barrel, and Pheasant Feathers, a Blue Ribbon winner at the American Film Festival (1967), took the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local politicians to task for the environmental damage the proposed Cross Florida Barge Canal would cause. His work at Blackside also included such highly-acclaimed films as Code Blue, to recruit minorities to the medical professions, and Voices of a Divided City, a look at racial attitudes in the wake of school busing in Boston, which was one of ten documentaries in the PBS series Crisis to Crisis.