“Societal Failures Are Dictating What People Do”: Reid Davenport’s ‘Life After’ Connects Assisted Dying With a Fear of Disability

I interviewed Reid Davenport for the Doc Star of the Month column in 2022, the year the Stanford-trained TED fellow nabbed the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at Sundance for his remarkable debut feature, I Didn’t See You There, which he termed a doc “about disability from an overtly political perspective.” Now the award-winning director returns to Park City with Life After, another doc about disability from an overtly political perspective—though the politics are complicated when the subject is assisted dying. As Davenport himself put it in his director’s statement: “I’m a filmmaker in New York City, living in a progressive milieu where conversations about the ‘right to die’ hinge on treasured values of choice and bodily autonomy. But as a disabled person, I can sense people’s undisguised fear of disability just below the surface. What’s a hot-button dinner party topic for some is utterly sinister for me, as I see people in my life exhibit a higher tolerance for the deaths of disabled people than for non-disabled people.”

It’s through this personal lens that we’re introduced to the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled Californian who in 1983 sought the “right to die” in a courtroom, sparking a media frenzy that morphed into a contentious national debate. And then, as so often happens with human beings hijacked for causes, she up and disappeared. This mystery prompted Davenport, who like Bouvia has cerebral palsy, to set out to investigate her whereabouts today. Through her story, Davenport explores the contemporary legal status of assisted dying and how legislation is crafted while disregarding input from disabled advocates. 

Documentary caught up with Davenport the week before the film’s U.S. Documentary Competition premiere on Life After’s aesthetic choices, the necessity of disabled perspectives in storytelling, and the political entanglement of the “right to die” with the refusal to support conditions of life. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: Unlike your last Sundance-premiering film, 2022’s I Didn’t See You There, you appear onscreen quite a bit in Life After, and even employed a DP (Amber Fares, whose Coexistence, My Ass! is screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition) to shoot. It’s a more straightforward approach, perhaps dictated by the material. So could you discuss this aesthetic decision? Did you ever consider including more images shot from your own POV?

REID DAVENPORT: As an artist, I don’t feel beholden to any specific style. While I actually do think there are quite a few of my POV shots throughout the film, you’re right—not nearly as many as there were in I Didn’t See You There. 

Life After proposes a pretty nuanced argument. I wanted audiences to engage with these challenging questions in a familiar territory without having to also follow new aesthetic considerations, as with I Didn’t See You There. But of course, I wanted it to be beautiful: cue Amber Fares. 

When I work with a cinematographer, I like them to be confident enough to make creative decisions. Amber is one of those special cinematographers who’s also a sophisticated director. So I had very few directions for her. It was, “OK, maybe use camera A for this angle and camera B for this angle,” and other than that, go shoot.

D: A wide range of participants across the U.S. and Canada appear in Life After, from Bouvia’s sisters; the wife of a disabled man denied life-saving care; to numerous disability rights activists. So how did you find all these folks and decide who to include? Were there other characters and storylines left on the cutting room floor?

RD: There was a large, brilliant constellation of disability thinkers and activists that informed our research and whose interviews simply couldn’t make it into the film. Two of those people were US activists Ingrid Tischer and Kelly Buckland. Both Ingrid and Kelly talked to us on camera about when they felt the weight of ableism and how that prompted suicidal ideation. They are now both fierce advocates against assisted suicide.

We also filmed with another disabled Canadian participant, a woman with chronic illness who sees MAID as a last resort when or if she runs out of money. She is a brilliant self-advocate—we discovered her story through her podcast “I Am Madeline.” Her story fell a little bit outside the scope of the film because she is primarily grappling with the failure of the Canadian healthcare system to cover specialized treatment for ME/CFS. 

D: As someone whose mom is a former hospice director who has also helped with assisted dying (in Colorado where a terminal illness diagnosis is legally required), I also wondered if you ever reached out to any assisted dying advocates, including those who might agree that Canada’s laissez-faire MAID is an existential threat to the disabled community.

RD: There are already quite a number of documentaries on this subject that make the case for assisted dying, going back to How to Die in Oregon. I wanted to do something different, and ground Life After first and foremost in the perspective of the disability community—to center the missing voices in this debate and their lived experience. And overwhelmingly, the disability community is against assisted dying. Nearly every major disability rights organization that has a stance on assisted suicide is against it. Thus, until we have strong federal laws, policies, and programs that take the needs and aspirations of disabled people into account, assisted dying legislation remains dangerous for the disability community.

At one point we did pursue an interview with Dr. Stefanie Green, a pro-MAID doctor who leads the organization that trains and sets practices for MAID assessors and providers in Canada. (Her TEDx Talk appears in the film.) But ultimately the only doctor in the film is Dr. Ramona Coelho, who has worked with hundreds of patients with disabilities and has seen firsthand the coercion and danger toward people with disabilities. 

We were more interested in understanding whether assisted dying laws, as they are currently legislated in the U.S. for terminally ill people, could be susceptible to becoming a slippery slope. And we also wanted to unpack the ways that our cultural fear of disability (and our deep-seated societal values of independence and productivity) is contributing to how terminally ill folks are already using that legislation. 

For example, you brought up Colorado’s legal requirements for assisted dying, which are similar if not identical to the law in Oregon, which legalized assisted dying in 1994. It’s quite revealing that, according to a 2022 study put out by the Oregon Health Authority, pain, and suffering are not among the top five reasons patients give for requesting assisted suicide. Instead, the top five reasons cited relate to issues well understood by the disability community: fear of being a burden on others; losing autonomy; less able to engage in activities; loss of dignity; and losing control of bodily functions. Disability and fear of disability are at the heart of how assisted dying legislation in the US is currently being used.

D: Early in the film you quite pointedly refer to “segregation” as part of the trauma of being disabled, and later include a montage of newscasters describing Bouvia as being “trapped in a body” they term useless. Could you talk a bit about why it’s important for you to center disabled folks within this wider context of marginalized communities?

RD: It’s pretty simple. Disabled people are marginalized, made invisible, spoken for. Like any other group, they need to be centered, in charge of their own story.

D: The repercussions assisted dying has for the disabled also have obvious parallels to abortion and IVF. Bouvia, like “Jane Roe” was also a cause, used by progressive lawyers seeking to change a system, sometimes at the expense of their clients. It’s quite possible that people with, say, Down syndrome may cease to exist in a not-so-distant future. Which makes me curious to hear if you ever thought about tackling those topics as well in cinematic form?

RD: This is such a great, multifaceted question. Yes, on the surface assisted suicide does have parallels with abortion and IVF. And at first glance, it would seem that advocating for assisted suicide would be in the “pro-choice” camp. In a parallel universe, it would be. However, when people are “choosing” assisted suicide because of inadequate healthcare, fear of being a burden, poverty— which has been widely reported as a reason why disabled people are using assisted suicide in Canada—I don’t see that as a choice. Societal failures are dictating what people do.

Pregnant people need to have bodily autonomy—and terminating a pregnancy because the fetus has a disability is ableist. Reconciling these two convictions is difficult. Disability is part of the human condition. I believe it’s a travesty that there are fewer people with Down syndrome because of embryonic screenings. As a disabled person, it hurts to know that pregnancies are terminated purely because of disability. The expense of raising a child with a disability is a serious societal failure, but I don't think costs are the primary reasons these terminations happen.

Disability remains one of those topics that is simply not covered from a political angle in the mainstream media. Anthony Mitchell Sr. and his son Justin, two Black wheelchair users, were among the first fatalities in the LA fires. Where are the discussions about how they were not able to escape because their lives were devalued? I try to tackle the most pertinent disability issues and put them at the forefront of the stories I tell, and I plan to continue to do so in my filmmaking.

Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review (The European Documentary Magazine) and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.