The Tallest Dwarf
Directed by Julie Forrest Wyman
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.
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.
PRESS
A heartfelt documentary that takes audiences on a journey. “The Tallest Dwarf” will help you see the world differently.
It’s a film that gives you insight into an underrepresented group of people. But it also makes visible their humanity and the way they want to tell their own story.
Wyman’s film is less about the drama of diagnosis, and more about understanding identity through family, history, and science.
The Tallest Dwarf also creates fascinating cinema out of various marginalized perspectives colliding... Wyman chronicles folks debating whether or not a panel for little people should have financing from a pharmaceutical company that wants to 'cure' them.
More than integration into society, what the LP community wants is respect and dignity—to live free from judgment and the gaze of others, with appropriate access and the same opportunities as everyone else.
An enlightening odyssey that uncovers the secret power and pride that comes when being part of a tight-knit community.
A unique and essential perspective on a world often marginalized and misunderstood. A deep dive into the complexity of a community’s experience, brilliantly guided.
The director deeply digs in… and presents no easy answers.
The Tallest Dwarf asks the viewer to consider important questions, like, ‘What if the culture created pathways for LPs to love and accept their bodies?’ and ‘What if LPs don’t want medical interventions that make them or their children closer to the norm?
SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS
- South by Southwest (SXSW) 2025
- San Francisco International Film Festival:
- DC/DOX Film Festival:
- Maryland Film Festival & Film 2025
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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PROFILED
Profiled knits the stories of mothers of Black and Latino youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims—Eric Garner, Michael Brown—are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.
Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for Black and Latino people in this country. Moving interviews with victims’ family members are juxtaposed with sharply etched analyses by evolutionary biologist, Joseph L.Graves, Jr, (The Race Myth) and civil rights lawyer, Chauniqua D. Young, (Center for Constitutional Rights, Stop and Frisk lawsuit). PROFILED gives us a window on one of the burning issues of our time.
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Ovarian Psycos
Riding at night through streets deemed dangerous in Eastside Los Angeles, the Ovarian Psycos use their bicycles to confront the violence in their lives. At the helm of the crew is founder Xela de la X, a single mother and poet M.C. dedicated to recruiting an unapologetic, misfit crew of women of color. The film intimately chronicles Xela as she struggles to strike a balance between her activism and nine year old daughter Yoli; street artist Andi who is estranged from her family and journeys to become a leader within the crew; and bright eyed recruit Evie, who despite poverty, and the concerns of her protective Salvadoran mother, discovers a newfound confidence.
The film Ovarian Psycos rides along with the Ova’s, exploring the impact of the group’s activism, born of feminist ideals, Indigenous understanding and an urban/hood mentality, on neighborhood women and communities as they confront injustice, racism, and violence, and take back their streets one ride at a time.
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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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