Wyman, a cinema and digital media associate professor, shares her experience with filming
By EVELYN SANCHEZ — features@theaggie.org
Many professors on campus have their own projects occurring beyond the courses that they teach — from lab-work research to writing papers to creating films. UC Davis Associate Professor Julie Wyman, alongside teaching cinema and digital media studies courses like small-scale production and experimental digital cinema, has also spent the larger part of a decade shooting her documentary film “The Tallest Dwarf,” which had its worldwide premiere at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas in March of 2025.
“The festival is very selective, and it’s hard to get in,” Wyman said. “And it was a really big deal to be selected for the program. We had three screenings there and it was very nerve wracking seeing it for the first time. It was screened in a 200-person theater, so it was kind of our launch.”
For Wyman, she used film as a continuation of a conversation surrounding bodies and their many forms, exploring their differences and prejudices.
“I had been making films already for a while,” Wyman said. “A lot of my films are about people whose bodies don’t fit in a lot of different ways. I’m interested in looking at people in a different way so we can see the beauty and power of bodies that get marginalized.”
Wyman is interested in telling the stories of different bodies as a way of exploring questions about her own.
“I made a film about a [transgender] man and his partner before our culture talked about transgender people, and before it was a word in our culture,” Wyman said. “That came out in the 2000s. I also made a film about a fat synchronized swimming troupe called the Padded Lilies, and another film about a weightlifter who was heavyweight.”
Wyman’s film “A Boy Named Sue” followed the six-year-long transition of Theo and how the experience affected their life and relationship with their partner. Wyman’s other film, “Strong!,” documented Cheryl Haworth, a United States weightlifter and Olympic Games medalist, as she trained for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“These are all documentaries,” Wyman said. “The reason why I’ve made these films is because I’ve had the feeling I don’t fit in [in] such ways. After I finished ‘Strong!,’ I was kind of at a point where I felt like I needed to make a film about my own body.”
“The Tallest Dwarf” was just that for Wyman. Engaging her lifelong questions about bodily belonging, the opening scene follows Wyman as she discusses her body with her parents and reminisces on childhood memories of difference and isolation.
“There’s hundreds of kinds of dwarfism,” Wyman said. “It seemed we might fit into one of them.”
The documentary follows Wyman’s journey as she discovers herself and finds community and understanding with other individuals with dwarfism. The film eventually leads her to the annual Little People of America National Conference, and one of the highlights is the interaction between the subjects and Wyman as the documenter, turning the piece into an artful collaboration of community.
“The way the project evolved is that it kind of leaned into this collaborative work with some of the key people in the film,” Wyman said. “One thing that has been said about my films is that they take a long time, and over time, I build close relationships with the people I’m making films about. I think of my documentaries as collaborations in a way.”
UC Davis students who have viewed the film have responded very positively, including Taylor Harrison, a fourth-year cinema and digital media major, who attended the film’s premiere.
“I thought it was inspirational,” Harrison said. “It was very fun to watch, and I loved the comedy aspect within it. There were some funny aspects within it, [such as when] she was interacting with her family and the other little people.”
Harrison particularly appreciated the collaborative aspect of the film as mentioned by Wyman, with the authenticity of the people filmed standing out as a highlight.
“They were being themselves, and they weren’t trying to be anything other than that,” Harrison said.
The sense of collaboration, in time, guided Wyman back to her original question of personal identity.
“Eventually, I get a diagnosis within the film,” Wyman said. “You kind of see it [gradually] unfold, how I find that out, and I go tell my dad because I start with him. And then you end up with me — I go back to tell him, and it’s a moment of reconciliation.”
Jatzira Gonzalez, a fourth-year cinema and digital media and history double major, also watched the San Francisco International Film Festival screening.
“You can tell it was a passion project,” Gonzales said. “It was super personal to her when she’s talking about herself. I think there were a bunch of things that were promoted and some things that were followed through, but some things were left unfinished. It kinda felt incomplete, but I understand if it was because she’s still living and learning.”
Even as an experienced filmmaker, Wyman naturally had reservations about capturing such an intimate story of herself.
“The main thing I was scared of was putting such a personal story on screen,” Wyman said. “I really wanted to do justice to my new friends and community and not overstep. It’s definitely very risky. I wanted to make sure I did it with integrity, that it was fair and that it lived up to the beauty and greatness of the people around me.”
Wyman also expressed her goals and ambitions she hoped to portray through the project.
“Artistically, the hope was to make something that kind of breaks some new ground in terms of little people representation,” Wyman said. “And [the film] lets people have a complicated experience and doesn’t tell people what to think of it. On a cultural and spiritual level, it was to provide a form of beauty in the world and make space for lots of kinds of bodies in the world.”
“The Tallest Dwarf” has thus far been showcased at the San Francisco International Film Festival in addition to the South by Southwest film festival, and the documentary’s team is currently working to get it to festivals taking place in the summer and fall. Next year, the documentary will be broadcast and streamed by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), where it will see its national broadcast run.
To follow the documentary’s journey, visit @thetallestdwarffilm on Instagram or @thetallestdw4rf on Facebook.
Written by: Evelyn Sanchez — features@theaggie.org
