Standing at five-feet tall with a long torso and shorter limbs, Julie Wyman realized from a young age that her proportions seemed different from her peers. Growing up, she was often teased and repeatedly told that her body wasn’t suited for some of her dreams for the future.
Wyman, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and associate professor of cinema and digital media at UC Davis, had been curious about Little People of America (LPA) and the dwarf community for a long time — and wondered whether there was a place for her there. Her journey is told alongside little people (LP) activists and artists in her latest film, The Tallest Dwarf, which is premiering at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on March 10.
“I always felt as though I was off to the side looking in, and that sense of being separate was rooted in having a body that was different,” Wyman said. “This feeling also became my reason for being an artist.”
Wyman’s mission as a filmmaker has been to make space for people like her, showing the beauty and power of those whose bodies are different. After 25 years of filmmaking, though, she hadn’t yet made a film about her body type.
“I didn’t even know what my body type was,” she said.
A question of belonging
Though Wyman may have had suspicions about her own family’s potential ties to dwarfism, she wasn’t sure if she was “dwarf enough” to approach LPA. But, when she found out about a controversial medical treatment for dwarfism, she felt she had a journalistic reason to reach out to LPA.
“Walking in the door of LPA was truly an electric experience,” she said. “On one hand, I had never been the tallest person in the room, which made me feel like maybe I didn't belong. But at the same time, I'd never been surrounded by people whose bodies, whose butts and thighs and calves were the same shape as mine and my dad's and my grandma's.”
As she was welcomed into the community — and eventually diagnosed with a form of dwarfism, Wyman’s focus of the film changed from questions about the ethics of these new genetic therapies to a narrative about agency and the culture of pride within the community.
“What I didn't understand was the long history of medical treatment of dwarfism and the different kinds of mishaps and abuses that happened along the way,” Wyman said. “I also didn't understand how that medical history was tied to a representational history. A history of LPs being seen as entertainment, and how being seen as a specimen and entertainment are connected.”
Bearing witness to lives we don’t know about
While many people are used to seeing little people as part of a circus act, Wyman’s documentary features early footage of people who worked in the circus just living their lives away from audiences.
“This material was filmed on the back lots and you get a sense of the life and livelihood there - just people hanging out off hours together,” Wyman said. “And even though it's a short piece in the film, it's, to me, close to the heart of the film's purpose: to bear witness to these lives that we don't know about.”
Wyman and her production team had a goal of working with the people in the film in a collaborative way.
“There's a legacy of little people serving to entertain average height people and that gaze informs directors, producers, studios, painters,” Wyman said. “Artists have always been interested in depicting LPs, but they're all coming from an outside perspective that says that it is unnatural to be this size, this shape, this physique. They're not coming from within the experience of how is it to just live and move in this body — just in its own right or in relationship to a world that's built to not to your scale.”
Throughout the film, Wyman learns about the history of this outside gaze and, with the help of her new community, flips it.
Screenings of The Tallest Dwarf will run March 10 through March 13 at South by Southwest.
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