Back in January, Ryan White’s Come See Me In The Good Light won the Festival Favourite Award at Sundance 2025. Also a winner of an audience award at Hot Docs, it is now about to launch on Apple TV (from Friday 14 November) and is screening at the new London-based documentary showcase LDNDOCS on November 21.
On the face of it, though, White’s film is not at all an obvious crowd-pleaser. It’s the story of how poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley confront Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
Gibson, who died in July, was a poet and activist. An immensely charismatic and funny figure, the author and performer championed LGBTQ rights and fearlessly questioned traditional gender roles.
Director White, whose previous feature doc Pamela: A Love Story (2023) chronicled the life and times of Pamela Anderson, had never met his two subjects before embarking on the documentary, and didn’t know their work either. “I hadn’t heard of Andrea Gibson before this, and I knew nothing about Megan,” the director admits.
The project was suggested to him by producer and comedian, Tig Notaro. “Tig said Andrea is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known in my entire life, and I think there’s this opportunity to subvert the typical terminal illness genre.’”
At first, when the project was pitched to him, White didn’t think it sounded funny at all. “Poetry and cancer sounds like a very unfunny combination,” he says.
But Tig was right. As White and his regular producer partner Jessica Hargrave soon realised, you can find lightness and humour even in the darkest places.
This is White’s fifteenth documentary. He has long experience of filming different people in unusual and often fraught circumstances but describes Andrea and Megan as “the most natural people with cameras in the room that I have ever witnessed.”
The couple may have been going through a gruelling and devastating period in their lives, but didn’t seem bothered at all at having a film crew living cheek by jowl with them in their Boulder, Colorado, home.
“They were like that from the very beginning. That allowed me to make the type of film that I think is really difficult these days since people understandably are so aware of the documentary genre and what the process is like.”
White likens the process of shooting the movie to being back in film school, in an era before celebrity documentaries, when subjects were still prepared “to live out their lives” in front of the camera.
“Usually, it takes many months to win over the trust of your subjects and they start feeling comfortable,…[but] they were acting like that from the very first day I met them.”
It helps that spoken word poets tend to be comfortable in the spotlight and are often used to sharing intimate parts of their lives in their work. “But I also think they are two very different people.”
Gibson (who used the pronoun ‘they’) showed little, if any interest, in how the film might turn out.
“I think that’s because they knew they were likely going to die before the film was going to finish – and so they didn’t really care. They were enjoying the process and living out their relationship around us,” says White.
Megan was in a different situation. “She did not have a terminal diagnosis, and she knew very well she could live with the film for the rest of her life but she is so herself in every situation…she doesn’t censor her own emotions. To me, she is the secret weapon of the documentary. I knew Andrea was going to be special, but I had no idea Megan was going to be such a fascinating and compelling second character.”
When White and the crew first arrived, Andrea said to them: welcome to my home. I guess you’re going to be with me when I die.
It was a blunt introduction. Even so, you can tell the film isn’t going to take too solemn a tone from White’s intimate and playful storytelling style. He’ll often tilt the camera to show the pet dog, or will show Andrea playing basketball in the backyard, getting the ball through the hoop every time.
As it turned out, Gibson was able to attend the Sundance premiere. Audiences in Park City were surprised and delighted to see the poet in the auditorium.
“I don’t think any of us expected the type of energy that was going to be in the room. Especially in Sundance, it can be a very difficult crowd…so hearing the laughter mostly, it was electric. People didn’t know if Andrea was still alive and so when they walked up at the end of the film, it was like seeing a rock star.”
This was a film that dealt with grief and death in a way cinema-goers simply weren’t used to. Andrea looked over at Megan at the end of the screening and said, “I think this movie is going to help a lot of people.”
White describes himself as not much of a poetry person. Although he was a literature major in college, he was “exhausted by poetry” by the time he graduated. Spoken word poetry in particular had little attraction for him. Nonetheless, when he watched Gibson read Guardian Angel Fish, one of their most famous works, he was bowled over.
Gibson is from a working-class background and grew up in “the woods of Maine.” The author wasn’t highly educated and, as is remarked several times in the documentary, doesn’t have a large vocabulary.
“But something about that allows Andrea to reach a very broad audience on a very basic level. That’s what disarms people…you can hear a needle drop when Andrea is performing. There is something about that very basic use of language that cuts straight to the heart.”
Inevitably, the filmmakers themselves were caught up in Gibson’s journey. This became a deeply emotional experience for White. “This film was much harder to delineate between myself as filmmaker and myself as friend but I think that was necessary to the final film, that tightness and bond that I had had with Andrea is hopefully what leads to such an intimate film. But it was a rollercoaster. I was extremely close to Andrea very quickly.”
There was a crew of four – and all the technicians had the same feelings toward their subjects. The usual lines between filmmakers and their characters were completely blurred.
“We continued visiting Andrea and Megan up until Andrea died in July. They were our good friends. Thank god we weren’t filming any more. It allowed me not to think about non-professional things, and just to be present with Andrea in their final weeks…”
The director knew it might be an uphill battle to sell the film given the subject matter but Molly Thompson, Head of Documentaries and Non-Fiction at Apple TV+, and a colleague, were at the Sundance premiere and saw its impact on the audience. “I think they were just as surprised as I was how interested they were in this film. Words fall short when you’re talking about this film. You have to get people in a room to see it before they understand it…”
