Romas Šležas, a Lithuanian-born documentary filmmaker who helped capture the early American environmental movement and later contributed to an award-winning series on the civil rights struggle, believed in exposing injustice wherever he found it.
During the 1960s, when environmental activism was still taking shape in the United States, Šležas and his filmmaking partner Holly Fisher produced three films examining the tension between economic development, traditional ways of life and the natural world. One premiered at a prestigious National Geographic Society event in Washington.
Šležas, who died in 2019, later joined Blackside Inc., one of the pioneering minority-owned film production companies in the United States. There, he helped shape Eyes on the Prize, a documentary series about the American civil rights movement that won Emmy, Peabody and other awards.
His career reflected a lifelong commitment to truth and fairness, said his wife, Birutė Vaičjurgis-Šležas, a translator who lives in Boston and regularly visits Lithuania, and Fisher, his former filmmaking partner.
“Romas was fundamentally searching for truth and justice,” Vaičjurgis-Šležas told LRT RADIO. “I think that is reflected in his films: both those about environmental protection and his later work about Black people experiencing social injustice. It simply reflected his values.”
Fighting to save a Florida river
Born in Klaipėda in 1938, Šležas fled with his parents to Germany during World War Two, living in refugee camps before the family moved to Boston in 1949. He remained in the city until his death.
He initially studied history at Tufts University near Boston. A film course he took toward the end of his studies changed the direction of his career. In 1965, he earned a master’s degree in film arts from Boston University and began working at a local public television station.
Through his cousin Marytė Kavaliauskaitė, he met Fisher, whom he taught filmmaking. The pair established the Fisher-Šležas film company and went on to make three films together.
Their first, Progress, Pork-Barrel and Pheasant Feather, was released in 1966 and took aim at a proposed barge canal across northern Florida. The project, revived after being abandoned as economically unfeasible following World War Two, was intended to connect the Gulf of Mexico with the Atlantic Ocean, shortening the route for oil shipments by about 600 miles.
But the canal would also have dammed and effectively destroyed the Ocklawaha River, one of Florida’s last natural rivers and a habitat for alligators, birds and other wildlife.
Local residents organised against the plan, seeking not only to preserve the river but also to challenge the political favouritism and corruption they believed lay behind the project.
The film’s title refers to “pork-barrel politics”, a term for politicians exchanging support for spending on projects in their respective districts.
“In Congress, it is customary to help one another: If your colleague from Florida wants funding for a local project, you support it, hoping that when you want something for your own constituents, they will support you,” Vaičjurgis-Šležas explained. “One hand washes the other.”
The filmmakers portrayed a state senator promoting the canal while presenting himself as a lover of nature.
“What we depicted in this film is still happening. Nothing has changed, only the projects are bigger,” Fisher said.
Environmental activism was still relatively new in the 1960s, she recalled. In one scene, a woman uses a roll of wallpaper to collect signatures against the canal, an illustration of how grassroots political campaigning was developing.
“We really wanted to make people angry,” Fisher said, describing the film as the most overtly political of the three she made with Šležas.
The filmmakers faced threats from people who supported the canal. On one occasion, they were left waiting in Florida’s alligator-filled wetlands for a local contact who had agreed to collect them at the end of the day. As darkness fell, they feared they had been deliberately abandoned to intimidate them.
The film also faced obstacles to distribution. According to Fisher, the pair struggled to find audiences and suitable venues for screenings. A politician featured in the documentary reportedly helped prevent it from being shown at Florida’s state universities after his daughter watched it and told him about its contents.
Despite its limited reach, the project attracted considerable criticism, and the canal was never built.
Recording a vanishing way of life
Two years later, Fisher and Šležas released Watermen, a documentary funded by the National Geographic Society. Its premiere took place at a society event in Constitution Hall in Washington, which can accommodate 3,700 people.
The film followed one of the last captains of a sailing fishing vessel and his crew on Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary on the US East Coast.
Rather than approaching the fishermen simply as workers, the filmmakers examined their lives and beliefs from an anthropological perspective. The documentary also captured a conflict over plans to introduce artificial oyster farming, which threatened to displace traditional fishing practices.
The fishermen, Fisher recalled, often spoke about their religious faith. They believed God had created oysters and that harvesting them for a living was therefore justified. Oyster farms, in their view, would interfere with that natural order.
The farms were eventually established.
“I think we captured the end of that belief system,” Fisher said. The film recorded a period when traditional livelihoods and religious convictions were coming under pressure from rapid modernisation.
The filmmakers’ environmental concerns were shared by a growing number of Americans. Vaičjurgis-Šležas said her husband, like many people of his generation, had been influenced by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which exposed the environmental damage caused by pesticides and helped inspire the modern environmental movement.
By the early 1970s, mass protests against pollution had helped build momentum for major environmental reforms, including the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Lithuanian-American Valdas Adamkus, who later became president of Lithuania, worked for more than 20 years at the agency in senior positions.
The duo's third film, “Psssht,” released in 1968, took a more humorous approach. The short fiction film followed a couple who relied heavily on aerosol sprays around the house. Its closing line delivered the punchline: “A couple that sprays together stays together.” Šležas himself appeared as an intruder who is sprayed with a canister.
It was their final film together. Fisher, inspired by the experimental filmmaking of Lithuanian-born artist Jonas Mekas, turned toward avant-garde cinema. Šležas became increasingly interested in racial issues and joined Blackside Inc.
“We thought our films were not an effective way to protect the environment. Romas became interested in questions of race. I started becoming interested in structural problems,” Fisher said.
The man who could fix anything
At Blackside, Šležas became vice president and worked with the company’s chairman, Henry Hampton, helping turn ambitious ideas into finished films.
His technical expertise earned him the nickname Mr Fix-It.
One of his most significant contributions came on Eyes on the Prize, the acclaimed documentary series examining the history of the US civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965 in its first season, followed by a second season covering 1965 to 1985.
The first version of the series’ pilot had failed to attract television networks. Šležas and his colleagues reworked it, adding new material and changing its structure. The revised film received a much stronger response, Vaičjurgis-Šležas said.
The series, broadcast from 1987 to 1990, won major awards, including Emmys and Peabodys, and continues to be used for educational purposes.
Šležas also remained active in the Lithuanian-American community. During the 1970s, he spent five years producing an English-language radio program about Lithuania with his wife and friend Perkūnas Krukonis. Called Garso bangos, or Sound Waves, it aired on Boston public radio.
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