Aleksandra Hodowany was finishing up a film degree at Columbia College when she landed a job as a photographer for a small local modeling agency. But after just three weeks she started thinking there was something strange about the operation. “We were taking pictures of people who were overweight, gangbangers, older people,” she says, and charging them around $300 for the privilege. “The owner would have these fake fashion shows with the models at nightclubs. . . . He’d put overweight people in tiny bathing suits and lingerie and say humiliating things about their bodies so they wouldn’t come back.
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When Hodowany quit a short time later the owner joked, “What are you going to do–make a film about this?” That’s exactly what she and her partners, Monika Szewerniak and Chris Collins, have done. Their Runaway Divas is a colorful spoof of the modeling racket shot in 2002 in and around the northwest side’s Polish neighborhoods. Hodowany plays a dim, accordion-playing wannabe with a heart of gold; Szewerniak is the jaded photographer who tries to protect her.
In 1999, after working together in Chicago on Hodowany’s final student film and a play directed by Szewerniak, they headed to LA in Hodowany’s green Ford Taurus. They wrote the first draft of Divas on the road. Six months later, working as translators at the Cannes Film Market, they met a producer who was interested in the film, but after negotiating with him they figured they’d be better off on their own.
Runaway Divas opens Friday, July 30, at 8 PM and runs through August 5 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State; see Showtimes in Section Two for a complete schedule. Hodowany and Szewerniak will ap-pear with members of the cast and crew at the Friday and Saturday screenings. Tickets are $9; call 312-846-2800. For more on the film see www.runawaydivas.com.
