Showing with closed captions/open captions and audio description
Filmmaker Reid Davenport has been making short films and podcasts on living with disability for almost a decade on his platform ThroughMyLens.org. But it is his feature-length debut, which literally places audiences in his wheelchair and in his shoes, that earned him the Sundance Documentary Directing Award. Spurred by the spectacle of a circus tent that went up outside his Oakland apartment, Davenport examines the corrosive legacy of "the freak show." Born in the same town as "greatest showman" P.T. Barnum, he sets out to study such objectification, capturing the ableism he encounters back home in Connecticut and in his everyday life as an artist in California. Cars that block cut curbs, the inane locations of train station elevators and the insufferable intentions of oblivious pedestrians are not merely proof of how society isolates the disabled. When viewed through the filmmaker's frame, such scenes become vivid meditations on how "othering" operates culturally in this groundbreaking commentary on spectacle. Myrocia Watamaniuk