Three documentaries premiering at the year’s film festival marry the personal with the political. Ryan White’s “Come See Me In The Good Light” follows spoken word performer and Colorado’s Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson and their partner Megan Falley during Gibson’s years-long fight against cancer. Elegance Bratton’s “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House” looks at the rise of house music and examines racism in Chicago through the life of Vince Lawrence, one of the genre’s pioneers. Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim’s “Deaf President Now!” tells the story of the 1988 student protests at Gallaudet University that led to its first Deaf president, a watershed moment for Deaf civil rights in the United States.
“If you could do this on your own, I wouldn’t be here,” poet, writer, and editor Megan Falley says to her partner, Colorado poet laureate and spoken word performer Andrea Gibson, at the beginning of “Come See Me In The Good Light.” Falley is referring to the work she does editing Gibson’s poetry, but she could easily be talking about their multi-year journey with Gibson’s cancer diagnosis. The poets share intimate and often hilarious moments in their secluded home and in the hospital, as documentarian Ryan White follows Gibson’s years-long treatment for ovarian cancer.
White’s camera captures everything from their doctor’s appointments to dinner nights with friends to late-night confessions about their fears about what’s to come, their love for each other, and the life they have right now. “We live in three-week cycles,” Falley says as she describes the process of testing Gibson’s blood every three weeks to track if the cancer has spread. White balances his footage of Gibson and Falley with archival footage of Gibson’s rise to fame as a spoken word poet in the ’90s and 2000s, their courtship of Falley, and their journey with their sexuality and gender identity, often underscored by Gibson’s powerful spoken word performances. “I just want to have a body; I don’t care what it looks like,” Gibson says at one point, putting into sharp focus the futility of focusing on the little things we so often let drag ourselves down in life.
The details of how the couple supports themselves monetarily while paying for Gibson’s many treatments are glossed over in favor of more crowd-pleasing emotional and philosophical revelations about the meaning of life and the power of love, which creates a bit of distance for your average viewer, who, given the state of this country’s health system, would likely be swamped with an unending barrage of medical bills in the same circumstances. Regardless, White’s film is a slick, heartfelt portrait of two artists and soulmates going through the worst life has to offer and feeling every moment of it as deeply as they possibly can.
While Elegance Bratton‘s “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House” is indeed about the birth of House music here in Chicago, it also serves as a people’s history of the city’s racist, segregated recent past. As Bratton traces the music’s roots in disco, he speaks with pioneers like Vince Lawrence, Kevin Aviance, Jesse Saunders, Celeste Alexander, and Lori Branch, who add their own oral histories about how they got into making music and DJing at Chicagoland clubs like the Warehouse, for which the genre is named, as well as the racial tensions of Mayor Daley’s segregated Chicago. Graphics outlining the city’s various redlined neighborhoods that created separate communities for Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian, Lithuanian, and Black residents are shocking even today, while Daley’s own racist speeches are as damning as anything I’ve ever seen.
Much of the film centers on Lawrence, whose stories from his youth are recreated by actors. In one sequence, Lawrence shares what it was like to be a Black teenager working as an usher at Comiskey Park when radio shock jock Steve Dahl’s disco demolition stunt escalates to a full-on white supremacist riot, which resulted in Lawrence experiencing a violent hate crime. Lawrence used the settlement he received to buy his first synthesizer. Lawrence goes on to detail the creation of Trax records with shady businessman Larry Sherman. Bratton also includes Sherman’s ex and current Trax owner, Screamin’ Rachael (aka Rachael Cain), whose claim as the “Queen of House music” presented as dubious at best. A reveal late in the film about Cain, Trax, and some unpaid residuals makes for wonderfully messy coda.
Music like Questlove’s Oscar-winning “Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” Bratton’s film blends civic and music history effortlessly while also having a truly banging soundtrack. You will learn a lot, get angry several times, and then get lost in the sick beats and dance yourself clean.
In 1988, eight tumultuous days of student protests at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. (the world’s only Deaf university) was a watershed moment for civil rights in the United States, becoming one of the stepping stones towards the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, aka the ADA. The story of these eight stays, straight from those who participated, is told in “Deaf President Now!,” co-directed by Gallaudet alumnus, model, actor, and Deaf activist Nyle DiMarco, making his directorial debut with Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winner behind “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The protests were a result of the university’s board of trustees—all seventeen of which did not know sign language, let alone anything about Deaf culture—appointing a hearing woman as the new university president, overlooking two Deaf candidates. The filmmakers contrast archival footage, mostly from on the ground news reports, with newly recorded interviews with the movement’s leaders, known as the DPN 4: Greg Hlibok, Jerry Covell, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, and Tim Rarus. They speak through sign language, with their testimonies translated through using subtitles, but also voice over actors (including Leland Oser and Tim Blake Nelson).
“The light of the Deaf community is Gallaudet,” one of the leaders says, “So we cannot accept a leader who does not understand our world.” Archival footage of both the appointed president Dr. Elizabeth Zinser and the Chairman of the Board Jane Bassett Spilman show both women coming from an “Audist” perspective. This is a word Bourne-Firl says the Deaf community uses to describe hearing people who think they are supporting Deaf people, but whose actions are steeped in paternalism. This behavior is never clearer than when Spilman addresses protestors on the first night by saying, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.”
Along with outlining the eight days of student protests and activism that pushed towards the instatement of the university’s first Deaf president in its 124-year-history, the documentary also sheds light on the generation rift between the DPN 4’s generation, and those who raised them. Covell’s dad was Deaf and worked in the basement of a dental office. “He just took it,” Covell says. Hlibok’s dad went to Columbia, earning three degrees without an interpreter—just reading lips. “It’s very important that you fit into the hearing world,” he told his son. “Why, I have my own world,” Hlibok snapped back. Bourne-Firl was literally a poster child for speech therapy. Her story leads to one of the most eye-opening sequences in the documentary, which outlines how Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, whose mother and wife were Deaf, pushed for a shift in Deaf education away from sign language, and into speech therapy. Several of the DPN 4 discuss what those classes were like for them. “They forced us to be like hearing people and think like hearing people,” the participants recall of their early education.
As the filmmakers weave all this personal and political history together, they cleverly shift their use of sound, working in tandem with re-recording artist/director of Sundance Audience Award winner “Crip Camp,” Jim LeBrecht and Greg Francis, and sound designers Nina Hartstone and Eilam Hoffman. The result is a firebrand historical documentary that is as crowd-pleasing and informative as it is innovative and inclusive.
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