Independent Lens
Real Boy
During his transition from female to male, Bennett is taken under the wing of his musical hero, transgender folk singer Joe Stevens.
The Tallest Dwarf
Filmmaker Julie Wyman searches to find her place within the little people community, exploring dwarfism within her own family and the diverse experiences of other little people.
- Length
- 90 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Director/Producer
Julie Wyman
Julie Wyman’s films engage embodiment, body image, and media spectatorship—informed by living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Her 2012 Strong! aired on Independent Lens. Her work is supported by Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, Creative Capital, Princess Grace, Logan Nonfiction, CalHumanities, and NEH.
- Other ITVS Films
- Strong!
Producer
Jonna McKone
Jonna produced All Light, Everywhere (2021, HULU/Super LTD, Sundance Special Jury Award), Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers (2023, Sundance) and Your Final Meditation (Rockaway, 2024). She is a visual artist whose work has shown in galleries with the support of awards including Rubys Artist Grant and Maryland State Arts Council.
- Other ITVS Films
- Fenced
Producer
Lindsey Dryden
Lindsey Dryden is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. She produced Unrest, which won the Sundance Special Jury Award, and Trans In America. She directed Lost and Sound, which premiered at SXSW. She co-founded FWD-Doc, and is a member of QueerDoc. She is a Sundance Institute Documentary Producers Lab Fellow and a voting member of BAFTA.
Producer
Shaleece Haas
Shaleece is an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer and director with 15 years’ experience in the field. Producing credits include Trans in America (Emmy Award, 2018), Asian Americans (Peabody Award, 2020), and Delikado (Nominee, Emmy Award, 2022). She directed Real Boy (Independent Lens, 2016) and To the Future, with Love (POV, 2021).
- Other ITVS Films
- Real Boy
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The Film
The Tallest Dwarf charts filmmaker Julie Wyman’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change. Julie explores attitudes about normality and rumors of dwarfism in her own family. When her parents are mystified by her questions, Julie pores through family photos with her father Paul and the two playfully measure themselves following Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man diagram of “perfect” human proportions. The film also highlights LPs who tell their stories of growing up, navigating pregnancy, and finding agency within a medical system that offers hope to some and poses challenges to others.
In search of community and belonging, Julie meets other LPs, each with their own relationship to dwarf identity and medicine. She partners with a group of LP artists in a creative process to confront issues raised by new, controversial pharmaceutical genetic therapies. The cast brings their lived experience to a collaborative workshop that explores the cost of conformity and the experiences of historically being put on display and gawked at in the present-day. Archives offer further context, attending to the echoes of eugenics in modern medicine’s history of “correcting” dwarf and disabled bodies. Through the group’s creative collaboration and the stories of LPs and their families, the film challenges the notion that people should change themselves rather than the structures harming them.
