Elizabeth Bouvia and Richard Scott appear in Life After by Reid Davenport, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Los Angeles Times

Life After Frames Debates About Medically Assisted Dying Through a Personal Lens

An interview with director Reid Davenport and producer Colleen Cassingham

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22 mins read

In 1983, Elizabeth Bouvia became famous for wanting to die. The 26-year-old woman was paralysed due to cerebral palsy and arthritis, and with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) fought for the legal right to terminate her life on her terms. After an extended court case, she was denied that right, and soon her story that had been the talk of nightly news and magazine shows quickly faded.

Decades later, filmmaker Reid Davenport (I Didn’t See You There) discovered her story. He wished to unpack all that happened at the time, and how Bouvia’s story resonates deeply with debates surrounding disability rights, right-to-die legislation, and fundamental questions regarding the nature of healthcare options for those with similar circumstances to her own. Along with producer Colleen Cassingham and a team of committed non-fiction filmmakers, Davenport dives deeply into the subject in an accessible yet moving way, providing his own unique perspective on events, and opening the eyes for even those that already may be versed on the subject to see things in a new way.

Tying these American stories to the recent Canadian laws surrounding medically-assisted dying, Life After exemplifies both a deeply personal narrative and a far more universal interrogation of the subject from a perspective rarely amplified, resulting in a deeply affecting, rousingly impactful film that proves to be highly illuminating.

We spoke via Zoom to the filmmakers prior to their film’s debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Reid Davenport, director of Life After, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Keith Wilson.

POV: Jason Gorber

RD: Reid Davenport

CC: Colleen Cassingham

The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

 

POV: Can we talk about when you realized that the story of Elizabeth Bouvia was going to be the hook of this particular investigation?

RD: When I first read about Elizabeth, it was pretty shocking. When I couldn’t figure out what happened to her, I was like, “Holy shit, this is a film!” She was stuck in my head for years. She got all of this coverage in the ’80s, but there’s much that is so similar and so different that helps illuminate what is being missed in the contemporary debates that Elizabeth’s story demonstrates.

 

POV: To dive in a little bit deeper, what was the context in which you heard Elizabeth’s story? Why were you studying this particular subject?

RD: I actually wasn’t alive in the ‘’80s to hear about this then. But I found out about here [in the 2020s’] while I was reading articles for fun – I’m kind of a disability study dork!

 

POV: So it seems you were coming from a perspective that her story was part of the general discourse of being an early exemplar of somebody that became a media sensation within the disability community.

RD: Yeah. It was also that she was divorced from this linearity about discussions surrounding assisted suicide and disability studies. It was like a story that I didn’t see in any other stories, and yet they all would be related to what happened to Elizabeth.

CC: We encountered Elizabeth’s story years and years ago, well before we started making the film. Reid brought up the film around 2020, which was right about when Bill C-7 [about medically-assisted dying] was being shoved through [Canadian] Parliament in the midst of COVID. Our research began at that ground zero. During the making of the film, we got to see the implications and the consequences trickle in. It became very clear that there were resonances between these contemporary events and Bouvia’s story, which matched the emotional heart that Reid had always been interested in.

Gregory Dugan appears in Life After by Reid Davenport, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival | Photo by Reuters. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

POV: How do you guys navigate this stuff working together? How does that actually break out in the simplest form? Obviously you’re working in conjunction with one another and you’re on camera. Can you talk about that working dynamic and how that all plays out from your side?

CC: It’s been such a joy to collaborate with Reid.

 

POV: That’s only because he’s on camera. I see what’s happening here.

CC: [Laughs.] I don’t feel the need to stay in Reid’s good graces all the time. Our collaboration is really so mutual. We have pushed each other a lot as the creative exchange and dialogue in working through this really complicated. This is treacherous, ideological subject matter. I think it could only have potentially been done in dialogue with collaborators in order to really understand all of the layers of the story.

When Reid pitched this story to us, he’d been sort of collecting data points – the Hickson story, the Jerika story – all spread throughout time, and all seemingly disparate. [Michael Hickson died from COVID-19 in June 2020 when doctors overrode his wife’s requests that he receive treatment, denying him nutrition and care. Jerika Bolen, who had Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2, drew national attention in 2016 when, at age 14, she decided that she would end treatment and requested a special prom as her final wish.] But in the back of Reid’s mind he was connecting the dots as he understood how sinister the connection between them all was. The work of making this film together was articulating those connections, doing original reporting, and putting these disparate elements in conversation with each other to create the revelations that we brought.

 

POV: It’s always a choice to make the filmmakers part of the story by having them appear on camera. How soon in the process was that decision made?

CC: I did not think that I was going to be on camera, and frankly I didn’t want to be. Reid barely wanted to be on camera in this film either, coming off the heels of I Didn’t See You There which was such a personal film. Ultimately, it was an effective tool for us, to give the audience a source of grounding and identification with people who don’t claim to understand everything about this subject, or an invitation about how to think about this debate. Our discussions invite them to think about how they grapple with the thorny aspects of it.

But also, Reid brings such a singular, blistering perspective in how he sees the world. It’s a privilege to be let in. His use of irony and sarcasm pushes non-disabled audience members to question their biases and assumptions.

 

POV: Reid, are there any times that you just say to your collaborators who don’t live your experience that they’re simply not getting it? As a director, sometimes you have to fight for your film, and ideally your perspective trumps all others. In this case, the subject matter is yet again personally connected to your experiences and your interests. Are there times where you’re like, “I know this might not be obvious about how this works cinematically, but this is important for it to be included for reasons that may not be so overt”?

RD: My philosophy as a director is to only work with people you trust with every ounce of your being. There is a reason you’re working with them. I really need other people I work with and I trust them and if I can’t convince them of something, there is something to that. There is this kind of privilege to work that way because that means you have that team you can do that with organically,. We might disagree and then we talk it out. We always come to a consensus.

 

POV: There are a couple particular scenes that come to mind that seem superfluous if one needed to cut down for time, but are some of the strongest yet most subtle moments. A primary one is of where you’re shooting B-roll, and the police officer comes by and he states that somebody thought that you were in distress. The whole notion there that, that rather than going to you and saying “Hey, man, are you doing ok?” somebody decides to go to law enforcement thinking that you simply living your life must be distressful. I’m assuming nobody’s going ever gone up to Steven Spielberg and asked the same thing.

RD: I think you hit the nail on the head. As someone in this body, in my body, in a wheelchair, in public, who isn’t going anywhere, who is just filming, that is seen as something akin to unacceptable or that something must be wrong. It’s a simple as that.

 

POV: Digging into that deeper, was there ambivalence to how you reacted at that moment? This thing has happened to you, you surely feel personally aggrieved, but as a filmmaker there may be a sense of “Oh, thank god I got this moment on camera to show what this is like.”

RD: For that incident, it was more the former because I didn’t really see it as part of the film. I wasn’t convinced that it belonged. Whenever I watch the film, I actually try to skip over that because it angers me so.

 

POV: So often filmmakers make themselves part of the film because it’s the easiest way to empathize with the subject. But this is one major instance where we see the absolute importance of both of you coming to terms with the complexity of this situation, and how critical your own experience is to telling this story.

RD: Including myself as part of the film is a way to make the film feel organic. The idea that I would shoehorn myself into a film wouldn’t do anything for my sensibility. Instead, moments like with the cop provide a breaking the fourth wall in an organic way, in a way that I hope deconstructs the notion of a film.

Julie Farrar appears in Life After by Reid Davenport, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. | Photo by Roberto Drilea. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

POV: Colleen, can you talk about those discussions for making it this personal? You could go today and cut the film and have neither of you in it. Perhaps it would be great, but it wouldn’t be this film.

CC: In the beginning it was kind of a practical consideration. In this early scene in this mode of research, we see in real time us trying to find out whether Elizabeth was alive or not. We just needed someone for Reid to talk to, so we just did one scene like that between him and I. Those were just in early days, experimenting with what kind of style the film would take. We had sort of a first retreat with our editor, Don Bernier, and he was the one in that early workshop who was asking if this was a buddy film. We answered, “Absolutely not. Are you out of your mind?” It was Don who ultimately helped us embrace this dynamic and he found a lot of warmth and joy and lightness in a film that maybe needed a little bit of it. So it was really Don’s push that shifted [the personal element] to be a device that we leaned on a bit more in later production.

 

POV: Reid, you actually say in the middle of the film that if somebody else was making a film about the right to die, they would not ask the filmmaker about whether they had ever considered ending their own life. I as the journalist, film critic, I had that moment of calling BS – I absolutely would ask anybody about what drew them to this particular subject!

RD: If I could push back, I guess journalists are exempt. I wasn’t talking about journalists. I was talking about other people I was workshopping the film with. You raise a good point and, journalism aside, I don’t think potential partners would ask me if  had I ever considered killing myself if I wasn’t disabled.

 

POV: Building upon that idea of journalism, this film presents a very specific perspective, or ideology, that doesn’t hold a lot of space for radically alternate perspectives. During the process of making the film, did you have any of those challenging moments where you clearly have specific things that develop about this particular subject and this situation, but you recognize as somebody who has a fundamental different view of what it is that you are presenting still has something to contribute to the discourse?

RD: This is a film about assisted suicide, but that’s just the surface level. What the crux of this film is about is all of the other things related to assisted death and disability which are government supports, and how disabled people are treated and seen by society. I see assisted suicide as all of those with disabilities and all of those other areas as inextricably linked. So you may have questions or disagree about the conclusions we draw about assisted suicide, but I find it really hard to call yourself a progressive and not see all of these other issues that aren’t being addressed as something as things that need to be addressed.

 

CC: It’s a bummer to hear you say that you think the film has a very specific and rigid ideology because there’s a version of this film that we feel we didn’t make which was like a manifesto film, but we hoped and tried to make a film that embraced wherever people were coming from on this issue, but was mostly concerned about our fellow progressives who are missing this  core cognitive bias, or cognitive dissonance that we wanted to point out with the film. We invite them to discuss it with us.

We think there are a number of different access points that people will feel activated or angry or very open about some of the things that we raise in the film. It’s going to be different for each person because there are so many layers, but we certainly hope that it’s an open text rather than a closed ideology propagating text.

 

POV: Let me be more clear than I probably was. It’s not as if you’re being dogmatic, and this films is not a polemic at all. It’s nuanced and detailed, but, as you point out, it’s clearly told from what broadly considered a progressive perspective.

RD: I think we explore this progressive talking point from a less obvious progressive perspective.

 

POV: When the foundation for discussions about right-to-die came about in Canada, many argued from the perspective of bodily autonomy and freedom of choice. And the fact that you guys in the United States are dealing with a situation where choice of reproductive rights is being taken away, among many other freedoms, this makes this particular subject that much more challenging to navigate. What your film does exquisitely, is it shows the implications that if you have a healthcare system that isn’t willing to provide care but instead has an encouragement towards death.

CC: Starting out making this film I thought I knew exactly where I stood on the issue of assisted dying. As someone with leftist politics, I’m deeply committed to issues of bodily autonomy. The piece that was complicated for me, and that I hope a similar sort of perspective or paradigm shift occurs over the course of watching this film, is a similar journey that I took personally. Choice doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Our individual decisions are deeply shaped by violent systems that constrict and construct those choices.

At first glance, it would seem that advocating for choice around assisted dying would be in the pro-choice camp, and as Reid says, in a parallel universe, it would be. But we’re not in that parallel universe yet, and maybe we will be one day.

Life After premieres at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Jason Gorber is a film journalist and member of the Toronto Film Critics Association. He is the Managing Editor/Chief Critic at ThatShelf.com and a regular contributor for POV Magazine, RogerEbert.com and CBC Radio. His has written for Slashfilm, Esquire, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Screen Anarchy, HighDefDigest, Birth.Movies.Death, IndieWire and more. He has appeared on CTV NewsChannel, CP24, and many other broadcasters. He has been a jury member at the Reykjavik International Film Festival, Calgary Underground Film Festival, RiverRun Film Festival, TIFF Canada's Top 10, Reel Asian and Fantasia's New Flesh Award. Jason has been a Tomatometer-approved critic for over 20 years.

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