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by Angelo Muredda “I’ve done what I can, and the quality of my life is over,” 26-year-old disabled woman and assisted dying cause célèbre Elizabeth Bouvia says in archival footage of her 1983 legal fight to refuse medical care in the opening moments of Reid Davenport’s Life After. Bouvia, Davenport shows us through a montage of the media frenzy around her case–which largely evaporated once her petition proved unsuccessful–became a rallying point for the assisted dying cause, represented by an activist attorney from the Hemlock Society (whose more palatably named successor group, End of Life Choices, is later seen clashing with disabled activists in Congress) and given fawning news coverage for her frequently cited physical attractiveness and disarming affect. That the frank, direct, and relatable Bouvia made for good TV, as evidenced by a condescending “60 Minutes” update from 1998 in which Mike Wallace casually muses about the tension between her lingering prettiness and the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of her daily care, is not in dispute. But to what extent, Davenport wonders, can a disabled euthanasia activist who didn’t die, whose WIKIPEDIA page cryptically lacks either new details about her life or a conclusive date for her death, as Bouvia’s does when Davenport sets out to find her, truly be said to have no quality of life if she continued to live it?
Bouvia’s largely unexplored life after her time in the limelight is what interests Davenport, a disabled filmmaker whose mordantly funny feature debut, I Didn’t See You There, saw him strap his camera to his power wheelchair in an equally guerrilla-styled and intellectually rigorous exploration of freak-show culture and accessibility in the city. More than simply a record of the thorny issue of assisted dying for disabled North Americans who face improperly managed pain, insufficient medical care, and bureaucratic malfeasance that alienates them from full participation in society, Life After is also the story of Davenport’s effort to forge a cross-generational kinship with a lost disabled spiritual cousin whose elusive whereabouts might, he thinks, illuminate his own life as a disabled person. When his preliminary Google searches turn up a low-res Imgur photo of a reasonably content-looking woman in a wheelchair by Bouvia’s name in 2018, he professes to feeling hopeful that he’ll find her in the real world, so she might serve as a kind of disabled screen ancestor to whom he could point and say, she lived. A bitterly funny, moving, and at times unashamedly political piece of agitprop filmmaking–we meet the director onscreen shuffling over to what he calls his “disability propaganda bookshelf,” where he first read about Bouvia in an essay by disability activist and scholar Paul K. Longmore–Life After sees Davenport approach the absent Bouvia with the tenderness and curiosity with which Cheryl Dunye’s directorial surrogate treats the titular actor in The Watermelon Woman. He connects Bouvia not merely to himself but to other disabled people for whom assisted dying is not perceived as a dignified life conclusion decided under their own power, but as a eugenicist alternative to healthcare, employment, and a fulfilling social and cultural life.
That pursuit takes Davenport to the frontline of assisted dying legislation today–which happens to be in Canada, where, at the behest of assisted dying activists and lobbyists, the federal government has recently created a controversial pathway to medically-assisted dying (or MAID) for those whose death is not reasonably foreseeable: a “Track 2” category expansion that now theoretically includes most disabled people. The film’s screening at Hot Docs comes only weeks after the United Nations issued a report calling for the state to repeal MAID for those without terminal illnesses, creating a federal watchdog agency to examine the types of Track 2 cases about which Davenport is curious, where poverty, barriers to employment, and inadequate social supports have driven disabled citizens to state-provided death as a viable alternative to a life in legislated poverty or pain, or a life concluded in an underfunded long-term care institution.
Davenport speaks with one such MAID applicant in Cambridge, Ontario, Michal Kaliszan, a soft-spoken, well-to-do IT professional and wheelchair user with spinal muscular atrophy. Since the recent death of his mother (his primary caregiver) and the provincial rollback of disability supports, Kaliszan tells Davenport, he’s started to look seriously at MAID as a way out of an intolerable hypothetical future where he may be extracted from his home and community and placed in a care institution, where he feels he will lose his agency. Rather than judging Kaliszan’s interest in MAID, which Davenport personally opposes, or mining any sentimentality out of his precarious situation as he waits to hear whether his case will be approved or a new pot of government funding will come through and buy him more life, Davenport views him with dignity. He films Kaliszan in his utterly normal home office, watching a video by a MAID assessor on his computer next to a shelf of William Gibson books, his personal library a sort of through-the-looking-glass normie genre fan mirror of his own disability propaganda bookshelf. Kaliszan, Davenport suggests, is another disabled cousin in the same fight, whose life is arbitrarily circumscribed by what he understatedly calls “a matter of funding,” to the point where death feels like a reprieve.
Fleshing out the mechanics of Track 2’s hasty expansion in Canada in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Davenport reaches out to former member of provincial parliament and disability activist Sarah Jama, who speaks to the social determinants of poverty and reduced services that similarly drove a number of her former constituents in Hamilton, Ontario to apply for MAID. Struck by the common theme of their stories and the broader disinterest of the Canadian public (as well as politicians from either the governing Liberal party, who passed the Track 2 extension, or the opposition parties tasked with holding them to account), Jama tells Davenport it’s easier for the average nondisabled Canadian to imagine disabled people dying rather than living into the future with dignity. He also hears from disability scholar and anti-MAID activist Catherine Frazee, who likens the legislation–by which more than one in 20 Canadians died in 2023–to the groundwork for a growing eugenicist purge. “Why,” she asks, “don’t we recognize new forms of an old idea?”
Davenport, returning from Canada, which he views as a cautionary tale for this friendly, humanitarian new face of eugenics (a sobering reversal of the smug #meanwhileincanada discourse that has often characterized Canadian commentary on the United States since 2016), hires a private investigator to locate Bouvia’s sisters Rebecca and Teresa, who flesh out just over a decade worth of her surprisingly full life between the “60 Minutes” interview and her death in 2014 (which Davenport adds to the Wikipedia page, like a dutiful disability citizen-historian), a period of stable independent living made possible by a Hail Mary funding opportunity from the state of California. He also explores a pair of troubling cases of disabled end-of-life decision-making closer to his Brooklyn home. The first of these is the story of a Wisconsin teenager supported by her family, friends, and local media in her decision to refuse medical care in hospice as a solution for her severe chronic pain, which a disability activist who has been soured on the inspirational coverage of the teen’s death tells him was likely the result of improper pain management and chronic underfunding. The second is the infuriating experience of widow Melissa Hickson, whose disabled husband Michael–represented in the interview by his empty wheelchair at Melissa’s side, opposite Davenport beside the camera–was refused medical care for a COVID infection in the summer of 2020 on the physician’s assessment that he possessed no quality of life and thus little hope for recovery if treated. Pain and quality of life come up frequently in arguments for expanding assisted dying to the non-terminally ill disabled, Davenport observes, not just from actual disabled subjects like Bouvia, who are entitled to their position, but from an army of nondisabled commentators, caregivers, healthcare providers, activists, and politicians effectively doing discourse from the sidelines, making death seem “palatable, even righteous” if the alternative is living with a disability.
A sarcastic, cantankerous, and erudite narrator who often speaks directly to the camera and is visible at the far edge of the screen during a number of his interviews, Davenport makes no effort to establish himself as a neutral third party here. This is personal for him, and, as is true for most disabled spectators watching the film, it’s potentially his future, as secure as he currently feels in his health, his personal relationships, his finances, and his creative work. And what if he wasn’t? That point is succinctly illustrated in a grimly funny set-piece where he semi-jokingly fills out a MAID application for himself after reading some of the literature–recreated onscreen in a satirical animated sequence–and watching video from MAID providers. “Don’t miss your chance,” his producer jokes to him after one such provider suggests that qualifying folks interested in the service ought not waste time, but the gallows humour quickly turns to dry mouth and discomfort as Davenport admits that if he’s being honest, he’d pass the application “with flying colours.”
What does it mean to pass the threshold of state-sanctioned death as a disabled person, anyway? Most of the people outside of her family and friends who knew of Bouvia, Davenport reminds us, knew her for her desire to die when she was 26 years old. They didn’t know that much of her pain stemmed from botched surgeries to medically correct her disability while she was institutionalized as a teenager. They didn’t know that she went to grad school to become a social worker, a career path she only abandoned, her sisters tell Davenport, when a professor told her she’d never make it in the field with her disability. And they certainly didn’t know, as we come to know through home-video footage that Davenport shares in the closing moments of the film, that for a long period in the 2000s she lived in her own home, supplemented with state-funding and a state-appointed live-in nurse, surrounded by her late-’90s Beanie Babies collection, scanning Stephen King novels to read on her computer, and co-writing a memoir with Teresa.
In an excerpt from that memoir read by her sister over the footage of these better days, we learn that, despite the limited image of her reproduced and circulated by mainstream media while she was in the spotlight, her life wasn’t just marked by a desire to die. She dreamed of financial independence through education–a dream that didn’t come true for her, just as the would-be living disabled ancestor Davenport sought in the Imgur photo didn’t turn out to be Bouvia. Nonetheless, the documentary record of her life that his film has expanded tells a more complex story than the one in the opening video, much as Davenport’s own body of work, in its drollness and probing questions and open disdain for the way disabled lives are reduced to aberrant bodies and projections about pain and suffering divorced from their social determinants and material conditions, tells a more complex story of Davenport’s life than his unsubmitted MAID questionnaire. Better, the film shows, to miss your chance and leave a record.
Life After was a 2025 selection at Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. For information about future screening opportunities, visit the film’s official website.
