An autobiographical journey of Ella Glendining as she searches to meet other people who share her disability, one so rare as to not have any statistics about it. We hear her many personal reflections about being disabled within a non-disabled/ableist world, and explore the moral dilemmas of medical intervention options that are available for some parents. In this episode, we break down Glendining’s IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
Sundance 2023 Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Distribution: Not available, but see Madman Films for updates
From the Sundance website: Born with a disability so rare that no reliable statistics for it exist, filmmaker Ella Glendining wonders if there is anyone who can share the experience of living in a body like hers. This simple question, one which nondisabled people so often take for granted, leads to a journey to not only others who live like her, but to the realization that meeting them changes how she sees herself in the world, as well as many surprises on this journey.
With intimate personal diaries, conversations with similarly bodied people and doctors treating her condition, and a searching and unique perspective, Is There Anybody Out There? invites the viewer to consider questions and assumptions they may have never encountered before. Are people born this way to be “fixed” by medicine? Is it ableist to see disabled people as living an undesired existence? With warmth and an infectious joy for her body and life as it is, Glendining takes you on an unforgettable experience that will change how you see others, like and unlike you.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.518] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our series of looking at Sundance 2023 documentaries. Today, we have a selection from the World Documentary Competition called Is There Anybody Out There? by Ella Glenn Denning. So this is a documentary about Ella Glendening, who has a disability that is so rare that there's actually no statistics around it. She's got these like shortened femurs and body shape that's fairly unique. I've never seen anybody quite like that. And she's actually similarly never really met anybody that has a body like hers. And this is a bit of a journey for her to find other people who share the same disability as her. So it takes this journey. She thought it was going to be one journey, but it sort of bends many twists and turns that she wasn't quite expecting. Very early on, she ends up getting pregnant and you have all these other dimensions of her continuing this journey of searching for other people who have this same condition as her. And throughout the way, we get this commentary from very loving parents that she's had, and she's interviewing them and getting insights and Also, just generally commenting on somebody who is disabled, what's it mean to live in a non-disabled ableist world and reflecting on a lot of dimensions that she's run into, both from her own experience, but also talking to other people with disabilities and hearing their experiences as well, and trying to find this commonality and sense of mirroring and identity for herself. So, yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial reactions to, is there anybody out there?
[00:01:52.828] Wonder Bright: I loved this movie. I loved Ella Glendening. I loved her friends. I loved her family. I loved the way she put it together. To me, the most intriguing thing about the film, the name and the premise, which is searching for someone with a body like hers, you know, we say representation matters. Well, what does it mean if you literally have no representation in the world? And so that's the quest she starts out on. But as an audience member, as someone who got to see this film, my experience is I have now seen someone like her. And it's going to stay with me when I meet other people who maybe don't appear like anything I've seen before. Ella will stay with me. Her question and her search will stay with me and her ability to stay in that question with the amount of self-love that she has. Just, you know, I'm melancholy by nature. And I don't typically think of myself as someone who has those reserves to draw on. And so to just be with her for a bit, I just found it very encouraging.
[00:03:25.123] Kent Bye: Yeah, some of the themes that I really appreciated that she was exploring, well, first of all, she's exploring these themes through her own first person narrative. And so as things would come up, she would comment on them and talk about different experiences of her own internalized ableism, you know, whether that's from natural birth or whatever it ends up being, she has these pressures from society to fit into a certain non-disabled mode of being. And so, you know, she draws upon these conversations with her friends and people that she meets along the way. there's these questions that come up along the way around the pressures to conform and to intervene in these different moral dilemmas that people face. And it's something that she reckons with throughout the course of the film that I felt was really quite interesting. And for her to really be advocating for this perspective that however people are is totally okay, and that they're actually valuable and bringing a unique perspective in the life that We shouldn't always try to rush to fix something that may not need to be fixed. And that was a perspective that I really appreciated her advocating for again and again.
[00:04:38.850] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it's this idea that disabled is not broken. And, you know, it's something that comes up in association with a lot of the films about people who live at the margins, where the culture itself is responsible for some of the worst damage, the cultural preconceptions about difference, and the need to say what is normal or that things that don't fit into the standard or preferred version in being different are then not good enough. In being different are just bad. and Ella Glendening in this film, but also just through the sheer force of her own character, is really confronting those ideas in a way that they become questionable just because she herself is so powerful. And we start out watching her through film footage that her father shot of her when she's a toddler and he's talking to her. And he is so, so loving. And when she turns to the camera and looks up at him and she smiles or she answers a question, The experience is she is just beloved. She is beloved. And I never stopped seeing her that way. Like I saw her through her father's eyes for the whole course of the film. And anyone who has been really deeply loved in their life, especially as a child, will recognize that if they were able to feel it.
[00:06:24.524] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really loved hearing from both of Ella's parents throughout the course of this film. I feel like that their perspective and their love and what they were saying to her was like, I don't know if you could say anything more supportive, more loving and more accepting. the way that they were responding to the mainstream reaction. A common theme, I think, was that parents who have children with disabilities, you know, it's fine up until they start to go to school and start to face all the bullying and all the difference that comes from this kind of cruelty that is embedded into kids as they see something that's different. And so, yeah, I feel like the love that her parents were showing her throughout all this was just really inspiring.
[00:07:07.043] Wonder Bright: Well, it just makes you wonder what would the world be like if everybody got loved like that? Like, that's where my mind goes, right? Like, that's something that this film is also asking. Like, what is the world like if that's the norm? Like, that should be the normative standard. That should be the standard by which we're judging things.
[00:07:28.339] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you know, there's some really shocking archival clips that are included in this film. Shocking in the sense that just the type of tone that some of these interviewers talking to people with disabilities, Alec describes it at some point of like disability as being like a fate worse than death. from the perspective of a non-disabled ableist world, just the type of reactions that are captured in this film that feel like they're from another era, but also are still contemporary today in terms of people react to disability. And so I feel like those contrasts that she's presenting in those archival clips are also illustrating this deeper thing that she has to deal with and fight against each and every day.
[00:08:14.745] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I mean, I didn't really find them that shocking. I'm not convinced that we've really changed so much despite the fact that those clips were only 40 to 60 years old. We haven't really come that far. We may in some ways have gotten better at like, moderating the mediated response to disability. But, you know, some of my favorite people to follow on Twitter when I was still on there were disability activists, because they had a capacity to really cut through to the marrow of what was at stake and the assumptions that people were making about things. You know, I mean, of course, it falls to the most marginalized amongst us to be able to see the truth of a culture. But when I think about some of the Twitter threads that I read when I was following disability activists when I was on Twitter, those news clips didn't seem shocking to me at all.
[00:09:22.080] Kent Bye: Yeah. So I guess what are some of the things that you're going to be bearing witness to in this film?
[00:09:28.691] Wonder Bright: witness to Ella Glenn-Dinning's self-love shiny, constant, unrepentant drive to see that self-love reflected in the world around her. I will watch anything this filmmaker makes. She has a very interesting perspective on things. And I certainly have a lot to learn from her in terms of like what self-love is. I will watch anything that she makes. She has a really unique and important perspective on the world.
[00:10:07.586] Kent Bye: Yeah, what I'm bearing witness to is the power of a simple question. Is there anybody out there and how that is able to guide her on this journey? And this film is a journey that she takes you on and it's probably worth people going along that journey with her to kind of have these different discoveries along the way. But yeah, I just really appreciate her ability to narrate and comment and reflect on what it's like for her perspective and her experiences. And as she goes into these different situations and talks to all these different people, I think you get a clear sense of this experience of wanting to find other people that look like you. And as somebody who's a white cisgender male, that's not an issue that I've ever had to deal with in my life. And so, I guess I can't really even fully imagine what it's like to be in such a unique body as hers and wanting to see if her experience is matching other people who have that same body type. And the end results in those discoveries that she makes along the way, I think are part of the magic of what makes this film so compelling as to each of these sort of incremental steps of discovery that she comes along the way. So, Yeah, so that was Is There Anybody Out There by Ella Glenn Denning. It was a part of the World Documentary Competition of Sundance 2023. And at this point, there's no distribution that's been announced. But yeah, thanks again for joining us here on Story All the Way Down. If you'd like more information, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com to find ways that you can support the podcast and get more information about this film and others that we've been covering and what else we're up to. So thanks for joining us.
