One of the most significant talents to emerge in documentary film in recent years is Reid Davenport, who broke through in 2022 with his debut feature film I Didn’t See You There. It chronicled his experience as a disabled person attempting to navigate a society that typically meets disability with fear, ignorance and loathing.
“I have cerebral palsy. I would like people to see that my diagnosis is not my biggest obstacle,” he has said. “My biggest obstacle is people’s response to my diagnosis.”
Davenport says he makes documentaries “from an overtly political perspective.” That’s true of his latest film Life After, which won a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered earlier this year. The film produced by Colleen Cassingham opens at Film Forum in New York City on Friday, with additional in-person and virtual screenings in other cities in the coming weeks.
On the new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, Davenport and Cassingham join us for a compelling conversation about the film and how it reframes the debate over the “right-to-die” movement. Sometimes referred to as “death with dignity” or “medical aid in dying,” the movement is often characterized as a compassionate option to end suffering for those with terminal conditions. But behind it, Davenport sees the lurking specter of eugenics, a discredited pseudoscience that proposed the enhancement of the collective gene pool by eliminating undesirables. Nazi Germany put it into active practice.
Davenport and Cassingham tell us why the case of Elizabeth Bouvia became critical to the film. In the 1980s, Bouvia, who had cerebral palsy, sued in California for the right to end her life with assistance from a hospital, at a time when California had no law permitting that (in 2016 the state passed the California End of Life Option Act). Ostensibly, her case might sound like an argument in favor of euthanasia, but the filmmakers investigated further and came to a startling conclusion about why Bouvia wanted to end her life – a conclusion that illuminates the reality of how we treat people with disabilities and the value, or lack thereof, that we assign to their lives.
(Davenport also explains why 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace makes an archive cameo appearance in Life After, interviewing Bouvia bedside in a way the director describes as “creepy.”).
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. The show is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
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