The Tallest Dwarf
Directed by Julie Forrest Wyman
The Tallest Dwarf charts filmmaker Julie Forrest Wyman’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change.
United States | 2025 | 92 minutes | English | Order No. W251318
SYNOPSIS
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. As Julie unpacks the rumors of “partial dwarfism” in her family, she discovers that she has hypochondroplasia dwarfism and that hers is the last of a body type she has inherited. She joins forces with a group of dwarf artists to confront the legacy of being fetishized and put on display. Together, they embody their full humanity as they dance, laugh, and create films that reclaim a complicated history and speak back to the echoes of eugenics in the newly emerging pharmaceutical interventions that make little people taller. Visually striking, humorous, and touching, THE TALLEST DWARF is both personal and political – inviting audiences to rethink identity, disability, and what it means to belong in a world that wants to change who you are.
SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS
- South by Southwest (SXSW) 2025
- San Francisco International Film Festival:
- DC/DOX Film Festival:
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Julie Forrest Wyman
Julie Forrest Wyman is a filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis. Her work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship—all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Her 2012 documentary STRONG! premiered at AFI Silverdocs and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Emmy Award–winning series Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s films—including FatMob (2016), Buoyant (2005), and A Boy Named Sue (2000)—have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited on five continents. Her work has received support from Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, ITVS, the Creative Capital Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, California Humanities, and NEH. She has been a fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research. (09/18)
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Four Wives – One Man
From Nahid Persson, the filmmaker of the award-winning Prostitution Behind the Veil, comes an intimate portrait of a polygamist family in a rural Iranian village. Persson reveals the intricacies of the relationships between the four wives, their husband, their astoundingly free-spoken mother-in-law and their numerous children. Sometimes humorous and often heartbreaking, this film follows the daily lives of the wives whose situation has turned them into both bitter rivals and co-conspirators against their abusive husband.
Persson’s camera unobtrusively and beautifully captures the range of the family’s interactions – from peaceful, pastoral scenes of a family picnic, to the temporary chaos caused by a broken faucet in the kitchen, to a furtive, whispered conversation between two wives about the latest beating. The women’s work – making bread, weaving carpets, milking and herding the sheep – provide the background to their frank conversations. Avoiding sensationalism and sentimentality, this film provides unique insights into the practice of polygamy and its effect on the women involved.
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