‘Stella’ studies gender ambiguity

March 16, 2015 at 12:00a.m.

Everyone knows the heroic story of Jesse Owens’ 1936 performance winning the Olympic gold medal in the face of Nazi Germany, but there’s another runner from the same era with ties to Northeast Ohio whom history has forgotten.

Her name is Stella Walsh, a Cleveland resident and Poland native, who represented her home country winning the 1932 100-meter gold medal and 1936 100-meter silver medal.

Someone who was not only intrigued by Walsh’s history but inspired to tell her story was Akron filmmaker Rob Lucas. His short documentary “Stella Walsh” will be screened March 25 at 9:20 p.m. at Tower City Cinemas in downtown Cleveland, as part of the Cleveland International Film Festival.

“I first heard about Stella in a book I was editing for my job,” said Lucas, a Gray & Co. Publishers managing editor. “Stella was murdered in a parking lot in 1980 in Cleveland. During her autopsy, it was discovered she had ambiguous gender.

“That meant she couldn’t really be classified as male or female. She had organs and traits of both males and females. I thought that was such a strange story.”

During her life, Walsh was a celebrated female athlete, who was known around Northeast Ohio for coaching track, basketball and softball. Lucas said she was very popular as both an athlete and a coach.

The 15-minute documentary explores the life of Walsh, her death and her gender controversy through interviews with friends, trainees, members of the media and a geneticist from Akron Children’s Hospital, as well as photos and archival footage from years of in-depth research.

Lucas, who studied video production at the University of Akron, had no idea how long it would take for the production to come to fruition.

“I thought it would take a couple of weeks or a few months, but it ended up taking almost five years,” Lucas said.

“She’d been dead for about 30 years, and it was very hard to find family members. It was hard to find people who remembered stories or had details about her life. It was tough to find footage of her,” he said.

“I looked around the world. I found footage in Poland, Canada and Germany. I had people translate emails for me to find footage and information about her.”

On the surface alone, Walsh’s story is interesting. However, it’s her ambiguous gender that takes the movie into a different realm.

“I found that gender is not just binary; it’s not just male or female,” Lucas said.

“It’s a spectrum. Some people would think it’s easy to classify everybody as one or the other but it really isn’t.”