“I can’t wait for the madness to commence,” UK filmmaker Ella Glendining, who has just arrived in Sundance for the premiere of her autobiographical documentary Is There Anybody Out There?, exclaims to BDE on arrival at Park City. “I’ve never seen so much snow. It also feels very surreal to be in the middle of a ski resort! It’s so exciting to see Sundance banners up all over the place.”
Glendining has a rare disability. She was born without hip joints and with very short thigh bones. In the film, which she first conceived around six years ago, she sets out to find someone else with the same type of body.
“For a long time prior to that I had had dreams of making a documentary exploring the experience of living in a very unusual looking body and what that does to a person’s psyche. But it was a while before I realised my own story was one worth telling, and that I could be a vehicle in that sense. As the film became more and more personal, it also became more and more focused on ableism, and what it takes to love yourself as a disabled person in an ableist world,” the director explains her goals in making Is There Anybody Out There?
The film includes video diaries shot by the director herself. Glendining was also working with a brilliant young cinematographer, Annemarie Lean-Vercoe, who came on board after the project secured development funding from the BFI Doc Society. By then, Janine Marmot of Hot Property Films had come on board as the producer. Marmot found Lean-Vercoe through her daughter, who is also a cinematographer and recommended her strongly.
“Annemarie is local to me, which was important practically, but she is also exceptionally talented, intuitive and experienced,” the Norfolk-based director observes.
The filmmaker and her editor Rachel Roberts worked hard to find a structure and storyline for the film.
The doc includes material from old childhood videos. It deals with Glendining’s pregnancy and the birth of her son, River. It follows her on a trip to the US. There is also footage from Tod Browning’s controversial 1932 Hollywood horror film Freaks as well as interviews with doctors and family members.
At the start of the film, Glendining is shown dancing in her bedroom. “I was about 20 when I came up with and shot the opening dance, so a few years before Is There Anybody Out There? was conceived,” she remembers. “The dance was a response to some guy calling me a ‘midget’ at a party and laughing behind my back. I get that sort of thing all the time, but this occasion particularly stung, because I had felt safe and that I was amongst kin at that party. It hurt that I was wrong about that. I love dancing. It helps me to reclaim my body when I have been shamed. For me, creativity has always been the only solution to the pain of being discriminated against so brutally.”
The road trip to the US during which the filmmaker finally meets some people with similar bodies to her own was both “exhilarating” and an “emotional rollercoaster.”
“On a personal level, I would say that I do not need to search anymore, so it was a great success! But it also reaffirmed for me how far we have to go before disabled people are seen and treated as equals. Ableism is an atrocity, and I am going to keep fighting for the disabled community through my work forever.”
The director’s mum and dad, who both feature in the doc but haven’t seen it yet, have been important sources of support for her, as has her boyfriend. “But just as this film is not about how lucky I am to have a boyfriend, it’s also not about how lucky I am to have relatively non-ableist parents,” she points out.
Glendining includes some shocking archival footage from old British TV programmes like World In Action and ATV Today. These reveal the casual prejudice with which disabled people were routinely treated in the only recent past. However, the director insists that the tone of her documentary is optimistic. “It is hugely celebratory of the disabled community and our resilience,” she says. “But it’s also very real and exposes ableism in a very specific, raw and painful way. The main thing that I feel sets Is There Anybody Out There? apart from a lot of other disability films (if I may be so bold), is that it is nothing to do with a medical condition really, and all to do with disabled people being perfect just as we are.”
Glendining was chosen as one of Screen International’s Stars Of Tomorrow in 2020. She is a fast-rising talent who is now planning a feature fiction film. One frustration for her is the ableism that is still so persistent in the film industry. “For me personally, it is lack of physical access that has been the biggest hurdle. It’s outrageous that in such a rich industry a wheelchair user can’t get into a production office, for example. And it’s so much to do with how we are valued – or rather not valued – in the capitalist society we exist in.”
In Sundance, though, the director and her film are being feted. The hope now is to secure distribution for Is There Anybody Out There? “I am so keen for it to get a UK cinema release. How dreamy that will be…”
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