“Life After, the latest documentary from filmmaker Reid Davenport, begins with the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a California woman with cerebral palsy who drew national media attention in the 1980s when she sought to starve herself to death with medical supervision and was prevented from doing so by the courts. Using Bouvia’s story and journey”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
In 2020, Davenport and producer Colleen Cassingham began working on Life Afterwhich is now available to audiences via PBS’ Independent Lens. While it started as an investigative look into Bouvia’s life, the filmmakers quickly expanded the film to explore medically assisted suicide from the perspective of disability.
“We really wanted to go deeper than assisted suicide, and we had to go deeper than assisted suicide,” the director tells The Hollywood Reporter. Along with Bouvia, Life After includes subjects who considered or engaged with medically assisted suicide. This includes Wisconsin teenager Jerika Bolen, who chose to end her life by stopping medical treatments for an incurable condition and was met with encouragement by family and friends, and Michal Kaliszan, a Canadian computer programmer who has spinal muscular atrophy and considers Medical Aid in Dying, a Canadian government right-to-die program, after his primary caretaker passes and he cannot afford adequate care.
While medically assisted suicide isn’t a mainstream cause of any one political party, conversations about potential legislation happen more in progressive circles and often in connection with arguments about bodily autonomy. But Life After sees Davenport and his team challenge the narratives, progressive or otherwise, that surround the “right to die” movement. In the doc, the subject of assisted suicide quickly dovetails into larger conversations about healthcare and its costs, and the socio-political status of disabled Americans.
“I think if you are pro-assisted suicide for disabled people, you do stay on the surface, and you focus on bodily autonomy. If you are a politically active disabled person, you are more likely to be skeptical [of assisted suicide] even if you are more progressive, he says.
Davenport’s previous documentary, I Didn’t See You Therewas about his personal experience moving through the world as a disabled person, from small indignities to large public failures. While the film earned numerous accolades, including a Film Independent Spirit win and a Sundance Film Festival directing award, the experience of being both filmmaker’s and subject left him drained. He didn’t intend on putting himself onscreen in Life Afterbut at a certain point found it necessary for the story to do so.
“What I have to say about assisted suicide and why it has the potential to stand out is because it is from a disabled point of view,” he explains, adding, “It sounds like a cliche, but every film is a personal film. I also don’t see myself as a journalist or as objective. I also know that 99 percent of films about disability are made for nondisabled people. All this goes into my confidence that I am able and should tell this story through my perspective.”
Life After premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won a special jury award and earned positive reviews. (“It tackles a thorny topic in a challenging way, with the tenderness, complexity and […] the personal perspective it deserves,” reads The New York Times review of the film.) For his part, Davenport was pleasantly surprised by the audience response over the course of its festival run, saying, “Documentary audiences are usually pretty progressive, so I was expecting a lot of people to get caught up with the fact that I’m complicating the progressive stance on assisted suicide.”
Life After is premiering via PBS’ Independent Lens series, and Davenport’s previous film, 2022’s I Didn’t See You Therewas released as a part of PBS’ POV series. In July, Congress eliminated funding to PBS, NPR and other publicly funded stations across the country in a move that rattled many independent filmmakers, especially independent nonfiction filmmakers.
“Over the past five years, streamers have stopped buying independent films. They have developed a formula, where they develop [documentary] in-house, usually about true crime or celebrity. So, public media was pretty much single-handedly supporting independent films,” says Davenport. “From my perspective, I don’t know how independent films are going to be made and seen now.”
But, for now, Life After is heading to Independent Lens after a long festival run. The director hopes the film helps cite a sense of urgency to change the status quo for disabled Americans. He says, “There needs to be seismic shifts in both the employment of disabled people, the support they receive, the health care they receive, and how they are able to access the community.”