‘Life After’ Review: Sundance-Winning Documentary Investigates the System’s Sinister Grip on the Disabled Community
LA Times
Roughly midway through Life After, a clip of archival news footage captures one of the documentary’s central figures, Elizabeth Bouvia, declaring, “I think one of my biggest things that really frustrated me was being trapped by the bureaucratic system on which I am dependent.” Bouvia was a fleeting fixture of American media sensation during the 1980s and 1990s after checking herself into a Riverside, California hospital to be left in peace to starve to death under the safeguard of “the right to refuse medical care” when she felt unable to manage her lifelong disabilities any further. When the hospital forbade her wishes and mandated that she be force-fed, Bouvia filed a lawsuit against the institution, which a California court ultimately overturned. After effectively being denied the right to die, Bouvia and her story, once a sensation in the public eye, gradually vanished into obscurity.
Bouvia’s fascinating narrative is reborn in Life After, serving as the North Star in documentarian Reid Davenport’s latest socio-political exploration of the disabled community’s experiences within the modern world and the legal and healthcare system’s control over their autonomy. What begins as an investigation into the aftermath of Bouvia’s court case twists and turns into a challenging portrait of the methods by which disabled people are continuing to be devalued by society, specifically through Western countries’ increasing expansion of assisted suicide legislation and its influences on the disabled community.
Davenport’s interest in Bouvia’s account began when he uncovered her 1983 court case, which spread like wildfire across the media nationwide as it played out in real time, with sensationalized headlines describing Bouvia as “trapped in a useless body.” Born with cerebral palsy and degenerative arthritis that left her almost entirely paralyzed and in a wheelchair for most of her life, Bouvia required constant professional care that put a significant strain on both her relationships and finances. When Bouvia’s situation was eventually worn out by the news cycle, she all but disappeared from cultural consciousness.
Life After begins its quest to discover how Bouvia’s journey endured, to understand how she was able to move on after being denied her mortal wishes. As Davenport stitches together inklings of Bouvia’s experience, his team’s research brings him closer and closer to probing the larger forces that shaped his subject’s world, the institutionalized directives forced upon people with disabilities. The director’s investigations feature a combination of interviews, news footage, and self-made videos that culminate in a work that engages with the nuances encircling the disabled community and their relationship to the outside world.
Multitude Films
In an era when investigative documentaries have been co-opted by and unceasingly churned out by big streamers (regardless of their journalistic integrity), Life After exists as an intricate and unflinching look into the plight of a marginalized population often disregarded by ableist mindsets. While body autonomy has possibly never been more of a politically charged, hot-button topic than in the past few years, Davenport’s perspectives (informed by his experiences living with cerebral palsy) reframe the audience’s expectations of how the work approaches the subject of medical assistance in dying. Admittedly, unfamiliar with the director’s other documentaries at the time, I assumed the work would be a more straightforward portrait of Bouvia’s life when I read its logline at Sundance, where it premiered earlier this year. Through the accounts it weaves and the questions it poses, Life After pushed me to examine my perspectives, informed mainly by a non-disabled understanding.
Generally speaking, countries and regions where assisted suicide is authorized are typically perceived as more progressive, offering their populations an apparent existential authority over their lives. Life After primarily focuses on the evolution of Canada's legislation for what the country's government refers to as MAiD, or Medical Assistance in Dying, created in 2016. Initially designed for those whose disability or illness-related death was foreseeable, the program's eligibility has drastically expanded over the years, with the documentary scrutinizing the grounds behind its development. Davenport interviews Michal Kaliszan, an Ontario-native, whose anxieties concerning how he would afford his care after his mother and primary caretaker passed away propelled him to turn to MAiD. Reflecting on his options, Michal says to the camera, "I didn't want to end my life... It came down to a matter of funding."
Despite its 99-minute runtime, Life After richly confronts the methods by which medical and political institutions devalue the disability community, often quite literally through the analysis of the cost savings generated by government enactments such as Canada's MAiD. The documentary's ever-evolving structure emphasizes the methods by which this minimization gradually works from the top down, filtering through all of society until "every disability is a deficit" in the mainstream’s eye, even if just subconsciously. Davenport's coverage underscores the quality of life concerns projected onto the disabled community by the ableist world, most hauntingly through the inclusion of Jerika Bolen's case, a Wisconsin girl whose debilitating ailments left her supported by her community to end her life at the young age of fourteen.
Multitude Films
While Davenport's efforts with Life After result in an eclectic collage of visual mediums, its structural ambition never feels overwrought because of the director's constant presence as a sort of spiritual narrator guiding the audience through the work, with his considerate sentiments and perspectives constantly blazing through. In his efforts to locate a wishful "happy ending" to Bouvia's story, Davenport reworks the archival news footage that painted her so woefully, thus recontextualizing her complicated chronology with a powerful empathy that she, and many in her community, were never previously granted. By reexamining Bouvia's account, Life After vigorously reconnects the past and present treatment of disabled populations in the hands of institutional powers to showcase the injustices they continue to struggle against.
4.5/5
2025 | 99 mins | USA | Color
‘Life After’ world premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award. The documentary begins its U.S. theatrical release on Friday, July 18, at Film Forum in New York City. Click here for more information about ‘Life After.’