Big Sonia

Directed by Leah Warshawski & Todd Soliday
USA | 90 minutes | 2016

At 4'8", Sonia Warshawski can barely see over the leopard-skin-patterned steering wheel of her Oldsmobile. But at age 90, Sonia has a personality that towers over her Kansas City community, where she has tirelessly run her late husband’s tailoring business for decades. The shop is the last business left operating in a lonely corner of a dying shopping mall, but for Sonia, it’s the vibrant center of her long, eventful life. Every day, she faces the threat of eviction, but Sonia has experience with escaping finality: As one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City, she witnessed the unspeakable horror of her mother disappearing behind the doors of a Nazi gas chamber. Today she still dispenses positive life lessons (known as “Soniaisms”), and speaks to local churches, schools and prisons about the atrocities she endured as a teenager. Husband-and-wife filmmakers Todd Soliday and Leah Warshawski (Sonia’s granddaughter) tell Sonia’s story in this moving and uplifting documentary that interweaves first-person narratives with memories from family and friends. Big Sonia received its Florida Premiere at the 2017 Miami Jewish Film Festival.