The Artist’s Stay At the Walker Hotel Featuring Filmmaker Reid Davenport
by Anjelica Fellini
By Anjelica Fellini
In grayscale, Reid Davenport's headshot repeated three times. He has curly dark hair and dark stubble.
In conversation with Reid Davenport, director of the new documentary Life After, which explores the issue of assisted suicide through the lens of the disability community.
Anjelica Fellini: When exactly did you first hear about Elizabeth Bouvia's story?
Reid Davenport: Apparently, I first read about her fifteen years ago…reading a book called No Pity by Joe Shapiro, which really politicized me. But, I don't remember reading about it then. I remember reading about her in 2017, reading an anthology by Paul Longmore, who is a pretty prominent disability scholar that talked about Bouvia. I was instantly intrigued. I was always interested in many disabled peoples’ opposition to assisted suicide — even though they were "progressive" in every topic. I thought then, that Bouvia's story could be a vehicle to tell this story, about this tension between the disabled community and mainstream progressives. I started Googling her, and I was shocked that there was little to nothing about her after the 80's. And according to Wikipedia, she was still alive.
Colleen Cassingham, Producer
Colleen Cassingham is a Producer at Multitude Films focused on politically committed artful nonfiction. Most recently, she produced the IDA Awards-nominated shorts collection QUEER FUTURES (CPH:DOX 2023), Executive Produced by J Wortham. Her past credits include Co-Producer on IT’S ONLY LIFE AFTER ALL (Sundance 2023), and Associate Producer on PRAY AWAY (Tribeca 2020), THROUGH OUR EYES: APART (Provincetown 2020), CALL CENTER BLUES (SXSW 2020), ALWAYS IN SEASON (Sundance 2019), THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED (Tribeca 2018), and LOVE THE SINNER (Tribeca 2017) which were distributed by Netflix, Topic, HBOMax, POV, and Independent Lens. Colleen's directorial debut short FROM DAMASCUS TO CHICAGO was broadcast on POV in 2017 and was an Editor’s Pick at The Atlantic. She is a 2023-2024 Sundance Producing Fellow, selected for her role producing Reid Davenport’s second feature doc LIFE AFTER. She is also a 2023-2024 Impact Partners Producing Fellow and was a VC Sony 2021 Mentor at The Video Consortium, a 2019 Points North Fellow, and a 2017–2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow. Outside of Multitude Films, she is independently producing Casey Carter’s Sundance-supported debut feature, TO USE A MOUNTAIN.
Don Bernier, Editor
Don is an Emmy-nominated documentary film editor who has worked on experimental, historical and verité features, series, and shorts. His editing credits include MURF THE SURF (Imagine Documentaries | This Machine), ATHLETE A (Netflix), which won a 2021 Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and earned Don a Critic’s Choice Documentary Award nomination for Best Editing; ALWAYS IN SEASON, which won a Special Jury Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival; the Emmy-nominated CHARM CITY (Independent Lens | PBS), which was shortlisted for a 2019 Academy Award; the Oscar shortlisted and BAFTA nominated AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER (Paramount Pictures | Participant), which opened the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and premiered internationally at the Cannes Film Festival; the Peabody Award winning AUDRIE & DAISY (Netflix), which had its world premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival; AND THE GENIUS OF MARIAN (POV | PBS), which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. He is a two-time Sundance Institute Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow, and has served as a mentor for The Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship, BAVC‘s MediaMaker program, Chicken & Egg, the Catapult | True False Rough Cut Retreat, and the SFFILM Makers Creative Advisory Board. Don is a member of the AMPAS Documentary Branch and an active member of American Cinema Editors (ACE).
Amber Fares, Cinematographer
Amber is an award-winning documentary filmmaker best known for her directing debut SPEED SISTERS (HotDocs, 2015), which aired internationally on Netflix, Al Jazeera, and RAI, her subsequent credits include WE ARE AYENDA (WhatsApp/Amazon) which won a Grand Prix and 2 Gold awards at Cannes and the Best Director Award at the Sundance Brand Storytelling conference. She also directed an episode of GUTSY (AppleTV, 2022), RECKONING WITH LAUGHTER (AJ Witness), was a co-director on CONVERGENCE: Courage Under Crisis (Netflix). She was a Supervising Producer on an episode of AMERICA INSIDE OUT with KATIE COURIC (National Geographic), and a Co-Producer and Cinematographer on the Peabody-winning THE JUDGE (PBS). Amber was a Sundance Momentum Fellow and Sundance Editing and Story Lab Fellow, and is based in New York.
Lyntoria is a documentary filmmaker and producer based in Chicago. She has produced content for outlets such as The Boston Globe, The University of Michigan and The Ford Foundation, and produced two seasons of Basic Able, a satirical podcast created by Reid Davenport devoted to disrupting ableism. She served as an impact producer on the feature documentary MOSSVILLE: WHEN GREAT TREES FALL, which premiered at Full Frame where it won the Human Rights Award, as well as the If/Then short doc STATUS PENDING. She has taught documentary filmmaking courses at the Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco Film School and Northwestern University. Lyntoria holds an M.F.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University.
Lyntoria Newton, Co-Producer
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Composer
Robert is an artist, curator, and composer who works primarily with, but not limited to voice and modular synthesizers for sound works in the realm of spontaneous music. Along with analog video synthesis works, he has produced an A/V proposal that has been a focus of live performance and installation/exhibition. The marriage of synthesis and the voice has allowed for a heightened physicality in the way of ecstatic music, both in performance and recorded. The sensitivity of analogue modular synthesis echoes the organic nature of vocal expression, which lends itself to Lowe’s aleatoric process. Lowe’s works on paper tend towards human relations to the natural/magical world and the repetition of motifs.
Robert has also focused on composition for film and television, both in solo scoring and collaboration. Over the last several years, Robert has collaborated on projects or provided sound in a featured artist capacity for such films as END OF SUMMER, SICARIO, ARRIVAL, LAST AND FIRST MEN with Johann Johannsson, and IT COMES AT NIGHT with Brian Mcomber. Recently, Robert has scored CANDYMAN (MGM/Universal) for Nia DaCosta, THE COLOR OF CARE and POWER(Netflix) for Yance Ford, MASTER (Amazon) for Mariama Diallo, GRASSHOPPER REPUBLIC for Daniel McCabe and docuseries TELEMARKETERS (HBO). Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Executive Producers
Jess Devaney
Anya Rous
Executive Producers
Ruth Ann Harnisch
Carrie Lozano
Lois Vossen
Dawn Bonder
Daniel J. Chalfen
Marci Wiseman
James Costa
Meryl Metni
Sheri Sobrato
Archival Producer
Brydie O’Connor
Consulting Editor
David Teague
Assistant Editor
Shannon Breen
Additional Cinematography
Reid Davenport
Daniel Chávez-Ontiveros
Roberto Drilea
Head of Care
Dr. Kameelah Mu’min Oseguera
Associate Producers
Paula Gonzalez-Nasser
Morgan Hulquist
Sonia Desai Rayka
Jot Sahi
Sound Recordists
Sam Beatch
Rowena Cluck
Genna Edwards
Nathan Frimpong
Robyn Huey
Caitlyn Mason
Caisha Thompson
Shuling Yong
Picture Finishing
Aesthetica Post
Colorist
Esmé Rogers Smith
Titles & Motion Graphics
Chris King
Supervising Sound Editor /
Re-Recording Mixer
Filipe Messeder
Captions By
StormMiguel Florez
Audio Description By
Social Audio Description Collective