The Tallest Dwarf charts Julie Wyman’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change. Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship—all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Julie Wyman will be in conversation after the screening with Pooja Rangan (Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Amherst College and Visiting Scholar of Visualizing Abolition) and Cynthia Ling Lee (Associate Professor of Performance, Play & Design, UC Santa Cruz).

Co-organized/co-sponsored by the Arts Division’s Film & Digital Media Department, “Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice“— a collaborative initiative of five UC campuses, including Riverside, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco, to address health disparities in institutions and policy — and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. This event is open to UC Santa Cruz affiliates.

PARKING
– Parking via UCSC permit or ParkMobile
– Core West is the lot closest to the event

ABOUT THE FILM
As Wyman unpacks the rumors of “partial dwarfism” in her family, she finds that hers is the last of a body type she has inherited. She joins forces with a group of dwarf artists to confront the legacy of being fetishized and put on display. Together they create films that reclaim a complicated history and speak back to the echoes of eugenics in the newly emerging pharmaceutical interventions that make little people taller. Through its personal and expanding perspective, the film invites audiences to a new way of seeing.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Julie Forrest Wyman’s 2012 documentary STRONG! premiered at AFI Silverdocs and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Emmy award-winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been awarded support from Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, ITVS, the Creative Capital Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, California Humanities, and NEH. She has been a fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute and a resident of SF Film Society’s Filmhouse, Siena Art Institute, Logan Nonfiction and Points North. Her films, including FatMob (2016), Buoyant (2005), and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited on five continents. She serves as Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis.

Photographer credit: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo; image description: A group of six LP (little people) performers regard their paper body cut outs on the wall.