Reid Davenport, a trailblazing filmmaker with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair, has made it his mission to reshape how disabled individuals are seen—and see themselves—through the medium of film. A central figure in what he calls the “Disability New Wave,” Davenport crafts films that don’t just center on disabled characters or real-life subjects, but rather excavate the deeper social, cultural, and political frameworks that shape the lived experience of disability. His body of work moves beyond storytelling into a realm of necessary social interrogation, spotlighting everything from patronizing societal attitudes to outright systemic oppression.
In his latest documentary, Life After, Davenport continues the deeply personal filmmaking approach he previously employed in I Didn’t See You There—a widely celebrated 2022 feature that blurred the boundaries between subjective experience and documentary realism. However, Life After takes a different tack. While still anchored in the politics of disabled life, the new film adopts certain structural elements more common in mainstream TV news documentaries, like dramatic re-creations and narrative cliffhangers. While some might find these devices jarring or overly conventional compared to his earlier, more experimental work, they serve as a gateway for broader audiences to confront some of the film’s unsettling and provocative questions.
The story kicks off with archival footage from the 1980s, featuring Elizabeth Bouvia—one of the earliest and most controversial public figures in the right-to-die movement. In a courtroom in Riverside, California, Bouvia—suffering immense physical pain from cerebral palsy and rheumatoid arthritis—sought legal permission to refuse life-sustaining care. Her goal wasn’t to recover or rehabilitate but to be allowed to starve to death. The hospital where she was confined responded not with empathy but with force: they began feeding her against her will through a nasogastric tube. Backed by the ACLU, Bouvia’s lawsuit challenged this forced treatment, asserting her right to bodily autonomy and the freedom to choose death over what she saw as a life filled with unending pain and suffering.
Bouvia’s story is just the entry point for Life After, which expands outward to examine several other cases and debates surrounding assisted suicide, particularly among disabled people. At the heart of the film lies a central inquiry: when does assisted death cross the line from an act of mercy to a form of societal abandonment?
This question becomes especially pertinent in light of a Canadian law known as Bill C-7, or MAID—short for Medical Assistance in Dying. Initially passed in 2016, the law permitted physician-assisted suicide for people suffering from terminal illnesses, provided they had a reasonably foreseeable natural death ahead of them. However, in 2020, the legislation was amended in ways that transformed it into one of the most controversial legal frameworks in the world.
The new version of MAID no longer required individuals to be terminally ill. Instead, it permitted anyone experiencing unbearable suffering—regardless of how near or far they were from death—to seek state-assisted death. One Ottawa lawmaker succinctly captured the emotional complexity of the law by stating it allowed people “to choose a peaceful death if they determined that their situation is no longer tolerable to them.” The emotional gravity of this idea reverberates throughout Davenport’s film, which draws upon firsthand interviews, archived news stories, and searing personal testimonies to examine the implications of such a policy.
The expansion of MAID has opened up a legal gray zone that some find empowering and others deeply alarming. In one particularly unsettling segment, the film cites a real-life hypothetical raised in a news program: what happens when a teenager, emotionally devastated by a breakup, seeks to end her life—and is legally entitled to medical assistance in doing so? While this example may sound like an extreme outlier, Davenport uses it to illustrate the dangerous ambiguity surrounding what constitutes “unbearable suffering” and who gets to define it.
This, ultimately, is what Life After wants to confront: the blurry ethical terrain where autonomy meets abandonment. Is the right to die a form of liberation? Or is it a way for governments and families to evade the difficult, expensive, and often exhausting work of caring for disabled individuals?
Davenport approaches this labyrinthine subject with both intellectual rigor and emotional clarity. As a disabled filmmaker, he’s not a detached observer but a deeply invested participant in the discussion. He never shies away from revealing his own perspective, but he also gives space to opposing views—allowing the audience to make up their own minds.
In one of the film’s most gut-wrenching stories, we meet Michael Hixon, a man from Austin, Texas, who suffered an anoxic brain injury in 2017 that left him blind and with severe spinal cord damage. The hospital treating Hixon initially advocated for ending life-sustaining treatment, implying that his “quality of life” was not worth preserving. This clinical judgment was not delivered gently—it was couched in bureaucratic language that spoke volumes about how institutions often weigh life and death based on cost-benefit analyses rather than compassion.
Davenport includes an audio recording of a tense exchange between Hixon’s wife, Melissa, and a hospital doctor. The doctor, representing the institutional viewpoint, seems to argue that extending Michael’s life would be a misuse of limited medical resources. Melissa fights back fiercely, asserting her husband’s right to live and rejecting the idea that someone else—especially a government-backed physician—should determine the worthiness of a human life. The scene is not just emotional; it’s illuminating. It reveals how intertwined the questions of medical ethics, public funding, and ableist assumptions really are.
Throughout the documentary, Davenport revisits the notion that assisted suicide, while couched in the language of individual liberty, can sometimes act as a smokescreen for a darker reality: that society doesn’t want to invest in supporting people with disabilities. Instead of building infrastructure, expanding care systems, and reshaping public attitudes, some governments and healthcare systems may find it simpler—and cheaper—to allow, or even subtly encourage, disabled people to end their own lives.
A disability rights activist featured in the film puts it bluntly: “You can’t address human suffering by killing people.” This stark assertion encapsulates the tension that pulses through Life After. The film does not offer easy answers. Rather, it poses thorny, sometimes unanswerable questions: What defines a life worth living? Who gets to decide when a life has become unbearable? Is autonomy really autonomy when systemic inequality, lack of access, and social neglect are the conditions in which the choice is made?
Davenport’s narration serves as both compass and conscience. His voice carries the viewer through the tangled moral terrain of the film with a calm urgency. He never lectures, but his perspective is unmistakably clear: the systems in place—medical, legal, familial—often fail to treat disabled people with the dignity and respect they deserve. And instead of fixing those systems, there’s a growing temptation to simply opt out of the hard work by institutionalizing death as a form of mercy.
Life After doesn’t demonize those who seek assisted suicide, nor does it portray every hospital or family as heartless. What it does, brilliantly, is show how systemic pressures can create circumstances where death feels like the only viable option. The problem, as Davenport sees it, is not the law per se, but the inequity and lack of support that make the law attractive to vulnerable people.
It’s telling that Davenport’s documentary returns, again and again, to stories of people who felt boxed in by circumstance—not just physically, but existentially. When care becomes unattainable, when access becomes a battle, and when being disabled is seen as a burden rather than a condition of humanity, then death doesn’t just become a right—it starts to look like a recommendation.
There’s a quiet rage beneath the surface of Life After. It never boils over into polemic, but it simmers in the carefully curated scenes and strategically chosen moments. Whether it’s the look in Melissa Hixon’s eyes as she argues with a doctor about her husband’s future, or the resigned tone in Elizabeth Bouvia’s voice when she reflects on her decades-long fight for bodily autonomy, the emotion is ever-present.
Yet, Life After is not a despairing film. It is a plea—for empathy, for systemic reform, and for a deeper understanding of what it means to live a life that is complicated, painful, and still deeply meaningful.
In the end, Reid Davenport has not only delivered a documentary that expands the conversation around disability and assisted suicide, but one that challenges viewers to look inward. Life After is not just a chronicle of individual stories—it’s a mirror held up to society, asking us what kind of world we want to build, and who we are willing to build it for.
Whether you come away from Life After in agreement with Davenport’s thesis or not, you will leave with questions that linger. Questions about justice, about value, about compassion, and about what it truly means to support one another—especially when it’s hard.
It is a vital, uncomfortable, and necessary film—one that does not just speak for disabled people but demands that we listen. And perhaps that’s the most radical act of all.
