Either/Or: Reid Davenport on Life After
This article appeared in the January 24, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Life After (Reid Davenport, 2025)
When filmmaker Reid Davenport first learned about Elizabeth Bouvia—the young woman who, in 1983, petitioned a court in California to require her hospital to help her die—he had a hunch that there was more to her story than met the eye.
Bouvia was born with cerebral palsy and had degenerative arthritis. She wanted Riverside General Hospital to help her starve to death. When the doctors refused and force-fed her to keep her alive, she contacted the ACLU and took the case to the courts—which repeatedly denied her request throughout a series of hotly debated trials.
In TV reports from 1983, Bouvia is clearheaded and firm as she insists that she wants to end her life—she is in pain, she says, and tired of being a burden on others. She is articulate, and even “attractive,” as news anchors repeatedly note in these clips: a poster child for the values of bodily autonomy, dignity, and freedom that the “right to die” movement seeks to enshrine.
But for Davenport, who also has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, something didn’t feel right. “I was fascinated by the fact that society was considering allowing her to die more than a decade before Oregon [became the first state that] allowed people who were terminally ill to die. California wouldn’t allow terminally ill people to die until 2016. So what does that say?” Davenport said in a Zoom interview last week. “I know well that even if we don’t see ableism, ableism exists,” he added.
There was also the fact that Bouvia’s story wasn’t finished. News coverage trailed off in the early 2000s, and there was not much evidence on the internet about the rest of her life—her life after, so to speak. That is where Life After, Davenport’s deeply moving follow-up to his 2022 debut feature I Didn’t See You There, picks up. Premiering at Sundance on Monday, January 27, the movie follows Davenport and his producer Colleen Cassingham as they track down Bouvia’s relatives to paint a fuller picture of her life and her desire to die, and to understand better—through conversations with various other disability advocates—the divisive debates around Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) for disabled people.
As Davenport and Cassingham investigate Bouvia’s life before and after the trials, layers of context emerge, shedding light on why a young woman with a loving family and professional ambitions felt death was her best option: the years she spent as a teenager in a care center where painful, medically ill-advised, and nonconsensual surgeries were performed on her; her time at graduate school, which was cut short by a professor who told her she’d never make it; a bureaucratic predicament that required her to stay unemployed and poor in order to access state-provided home care. On top of all that: heartbreak, grief, and loneliness.
How freely can someone make choices if their options are a rock and a hard place? This is the question Davenport poses in the film, sketching a carefully observed and scrupulously researched portrait of a health-care system and society where disabled people are denied even the basic amenities of a good life. “Before we even have a discussion about dying with dignity, we need to guarantee life with dignity,” said Davenport.
“This film is all about promoting choice, and that choice should start during life. That means employing disabled people, giving them government support, giving them health care, providing them the means to live in society and pursue their dreams as much as nondisabled people are allowed to pursue their dreams.”
In the U.S., assisted suicide is legal in 10 states as well as Washington, D.C. for people with a terminal diagnosis. In Canada, assisted dying has been legal since 2016, and the legislation was expanded in 2021 to include people with “grievous and irredeemable” medical conditions, even when natural death is not “reasonably foreseeable.” In 2027, these laws will also apply to people with severe refractory mental illnesses. All these changes have incited criticism and pushback from disability advocates and human-rights experts, who argue that in a society where home care, employment, and affordable health care are hard to come by, disabled people will be coerced, implicitly or explicitly, into choosing death.
One of the interviewees in Life After, Michal Kaliszan, is a computer programmer with spinal muscular atrophy living in Ontario. He details in the film how he started considering MAID a few years ago, after his mother, who had been his primary caregiver his whole life, passed away, and the government-supported home care he received was reduced. Private care was too expensive, and his only option, if he wanted to continue living, was to enter a long-term care institution—a facility he describes in the film as akin to a prison.
“[Care centers] are very profitable,” says Davenport.“I’m reading this book about capitalism and disability, and it discusses how the government tries to hold a certain amount of people unemployed, so that wages don’t go up. And once you institutionalize those people, you give the care industry even more money, and more incentive to make money.”
Life After highlights how a similar transactional logic can be seen in the decision-making behind MAID for disabled people. One of the speakers in the film, family physician Ramona Coelho, points out that Canadian lawmakers commissioned and took into consideration a report on how much money the expansion of MAID would save the health-care industry. The answer: $149 million per year.
Another case explored in the film is that of Michael Hickson, a middle-aged man in Texas who had developed disabilities due to a brain injury. He was removed from a ventilator against his wife’s wishes while undergoing treatment for COVID-19 because doctors decided that his “quality of life” had no improvement in sight. “Who gets to make the decision that somebody’s quality of life—if they have a disability—that their quality of life is not good?” his wife, Melissa, is heard asking the doctor in a recorded conversation.
What makes Life After so effective is how it balances investigation and reportage with Davenport’s own firsthand perspective. We often see the director and his filmmaking equipment on screen: sometimes there’s a glimpse of him behind the camera as he’s conducting an interview; at other times, his shoulder bobs up and down over the edge of the frame. “I wanted to remind people that I was making this film—that a disabled person who uses a wheelchair was making the film,” said Davenport. “It is as much of an insider perspective as it could be, without being a memoir.”
I Didn’t See You There, which premiered at Sundance in 2022, was something like a memoir, though it packed a similarly hefty political punch: Davenport filmed himself as he navigated public spaces in America, documenting—with wry humor, sharp critique, and visual flair—the ways in which the world refuses to accommodate people like him, in both small and big ways.
Similar scenes appear in Life After. At a street intersection, Davenport is stopped by a police officer, who asks if he needs an ambulance; someone had told the cop that Davenport looked like he was in distress. “Why would I need an ambulance?” Davenport asks. The implications and the danger of this encounter are clear: nondisabled people assume suffering and crisis when they see disabled individuals like Davenport—and they’d sooner call a cop than talk directly to him.
In another scene, Davenport fills out Canada’s MAID application form online alongside Cassingham. As he goes through each section, and realizes he would fulfill most of the criteria “with flying colors,” he becomes increasingly somber. “I wonder how I would view my life if I didn’t have the support and the family and my partner and my friends,” he says aloud in the film. Cassingham responds: “I feel the same way. What if I didn’t have any of those things either? I wouldn’t be allowed to do this.”
“When she said that, it was a real wake-up call for me,” Davenport said in our interview. “She even talks about how much the film spoke to her as a nondisabled person, where she also is concerned about health care for everyone. I was looking at this from a disabled perspective, and she was able to kind of globalize it.”
That’s the strength of Life After: its keen, structural analysis of our presumptions about what a good life looks like—and who can have it—implicates us all, underlining the ethos of disposability so deeply embedded in the institutions we rely on for care. It’s the path that Davenport believes more disabled storytellers need to be able to take: “I think the vast majority of documentaries about disability are still apolitical, and that apolitical-ness is ableist.”
“In this climate, where it’s either true-crime or celebrity documentaries, the space for political films feels like it’s shrinking,” he said. “I hope to continue to carve out a political space because that’s what independent films are—they’re political.”