INTERVIEW: Director Reid Davenport offers his perspective on disability in PBS film
Photo: I Didn’t See You There, a new film from Reid Davenport, is currently available to stream on PBS.org. Photo courtesy of filmmaker / Provided by The 2050 Group Publicity.
Image ID: A still image from the film shows a person in a black coat and yellow pants walking across the street. On the street, we see the shadow of a person in a wheelchair on the white lines of the pedestrian crossing.
I Didn’t See You There, the new documentary from filmmaker Reid Davenport, recently premiered on the POV program on PBS and is now available to stream free of charge until Feb. 9 at pbs.org. The film is a portrait of Davenport’s life and how he captures “the personal and poetic from his wheelchair,” offering his physical perspective to the audience and changing the traditional gaze on disability.
“POV is an appropriate partner because of how many people they can reach and how accessible it is to a whole host of people, so it was very gratifying that, after a year of festivals, it was made available to the general public,” Davenport said recently during a phone interview. “I started shooting it in 2018. I didn’t really know if it was a film, if it was a social media post, if it was just for me.”
Eventually Davenport started to realize that the project could be expanded and that it would be a fitting movie for his feature-length debut. He connected with Keith Wilson, who would become the producer of the documentary, and the team started building a narrative. One theme that emerged was that the filmmaker’s apartment in Oakland, California, offered a view of a circus tent outside the window, and this caused the director to consider the “spectacle, (in)visibility and the corrosive legacy of the freak show,” according to press notes.
“I started shooting before the tent went up,” he said. “The tent was so bizarre and spectacular and triggering and disturbing. … We weren’t sure until about halfway through post-production whether the tent would be a motif. It was great to realize that we were able to fit it in.”
Davenport said he and his team members on the film are mostly non-prescriptive on what audience members should take away from the movie. The filmmaker is open to any interpretation, but he does hope something can be taken away from the project. Overall, Davenport said he makes films about disability from an overtly political perspective, and this includes his previous cinematic efforts, all of them short documentaries: A Cerebral Game, Wheelchair Diaries: One Step Up and Ramped Up.
“Disability is often framed as an individual problem that is defined by medical conditions, but really disability describes a group of politically marginalized people,” Davenport said. “This is not an original thought. These ideas have been around for decades, but in documentary, we see disability as individualistic and stemming from an ‘abnormal’ body. But if you really want to see disability, you don’t film people with disabilities. You film people’s reactions to people with disabilities. That’s where the discrimination is. That is where the inequity lies, and that is why disabled people continue to be marginalized.”
Davenport said that there needs to be a recognition of the tapestry of art that disabled people are making. No singular piece of work, in his mind, can necessarily change society’s perspective. Instead, he’s promoting a holistic reconfiguring of how people think about disability. “And in that construct, viewing more disabled people’s work would mean letting the artwork that disabled people are making into the mainstream,” he said.
Davenport’s love for cinema came when he was an undergraduate student. He was supposed to study abroad in Italy, but when he said that he uses a wheelchair, “they basically told me not to come.” Instead, he took a course on documentary filmmaking, and he began to explore the inaccessibility of Western Europe. The documentary short that he created from the experience is called Wheelchair Diaries: One Step Up.
Since those early days, Davenport has found much success with his cinematic career.
I Didn’t See You There won the documentary directing award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, in addition to the Grand Jury Award from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and McBane Bay Area Documentary Feature Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival.
“It’s wild,” Davenport said of the film’s success. “I never thought it would get to this point. I was delighted. This film is made for disabled people who don’t see themselves portrayed accurately on screen, but I was really delighted to see how it resonated with so many non-disabled people and how I think different people take away different things from it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
I Didn’t See You There, directed by Reid Davenport, is now available to stream for free on PBS.org. Click here for more information.
