LIFE AFTER
Directed by Reid Davenport
In 1983, a disabled Californian woman named Elizabeth Bouvia sought the “right to die,” igniting a national debate about autonomy, dignity, and the value of disabled lives. After years of courtroom trials, Bouvia disappeared from public view. Disabled director Reid Davenport investigates what happened to Bouvia and her story’s disturbing relevance today.
A Co-production of Independent Television Service (ITVS),
A Multitude Films Production,
In Association With Straw House Productions, The Harnisch Foundation, The deNovo Initiative, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Catapult Film Fund, Perspective Fund, Ford Foundation JustFilms
2025 / 98 MINS
About
the Team
Reid Davenport — Director
Reid makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. His first feature film, I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the McBaine Bay Area Documentary Award at San Francisco IFF. It had a national broadcast on POV in 2023. The film has been hailed by critics as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice” and a “must-see.” In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A CEREBRAL GAME, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival for “creating a visual landscape that is at once disorienting and nostalgic - and the result is so raw and compelling it's impossible to turn away.”
Along with A CEREBRAL GAME, his short documentaries WHEELCHAIR DIARIES and RAMPED UP are distributed by New Day Films. Reid was a 2017 TED fellow and gave a TED Talk about incorporating his own literal body into his filmmaking. His work has been featured by outlets like NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reid holds an MFA in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University and a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from The George Washington University
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).
Lyntoria Newton — Co-producer
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.
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.
Archival Producer
Brydie O’Connor
Consulting Editor
David Teague
Producer
Colleen Cassingham
Executive Producers
Jess Devaney
Anya Rous
Executive Producers
Ruth Ann Harnisch
Dawn Bonder
Daniel J. Chalfen
Marci Wiseman
James Costa
Carrie Lozano
Lois Voissen
Colorist
Esmé Rogers Smith
Supervising Sound Editor / Re-Recording Mixer
Filipe Messeder
