I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, Part 2
The Filmmakers

Producer Keith Wilson Statement (Edited for Style)

In 2018, I met Reid in a Downtown Oakland cafe because I was stuck. I had begun working on a feature-length film (now a live documentary) about the late performance artist and teacher Frank Moore who used a wheelchair and was labeled by many as controversial and creepy.

Reid was an enthusiastic supporter of me creating a nuanced and formally adventurous portrait of a person with a disability. He was also unafraid to call me out on my ableism, my myopic approach to the material, and my limited understanding of disability history and theory. I was grateful for his honesty, insight, and facetious humor about it all.

I was grateful to have Reid’s candor and I was already a fan of his past short films. But it wasn’t until he shared some early test footage from I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE that I understood the resonance and generosity of his filmmaking. His thoughtful, kinetic camerawork captured so much – the weight of a stranger’s stare, the existential riddle of a fly trap, the shapes and patterns of the built environment, the energetic joy of moving through the world in a wheelchair.

Picture Courtesy MPRM Communications

Reid’s cinematic strategy made me feel unstuck, alive, present. I knew the project needed to become a feature.

As a producer, director, and artist, I want to engage with work that delights, surprises, implicates, and generates. It is my honor to be the producer of I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE Didn’t See You There, and I look forward to propelling audiences towards its bold, joyous, much-needed lens and language.

 

About the Filmmakers (Edited for Style)

Reid Davenport, Director, Director of Photography: Makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. Reid’s first feature film, I Didn’t See You There, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. His 2016 short film, A Cerebral Game, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival for “creating a visual landscape that is at once disorienting and nostalgic – and the result is so raw and compelling it’s impossible to turn away.”

Reid’s short documentaries Wheelchair Diaries and RAMPED UP are distributed by New Day Films and his work has been supported by The Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, XTR, ITVS, NBCUniversal, CNN and the Points North Institute, among others. In 2020, he was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.”

In 2017, Reid was a TED fellow and gave a TED Talk about incorporating his own literal body into his filmmaking. His work has been featured by outlets like NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Davenport received a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University in 2016, and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication from The George Washington University in 2012.

 

Kieth Wilson, Producer: Is a producer, director and artist based in Athens, Georgia. whose films have screened at Sundance, the Berlinale, Hot Docs, the U.S. National Gallery of Art, documenta14, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the producer of Joonam (Sundance 2023) and was a 2021 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow His recent short film The Tree screened at MoMA’s 2019 Doc Fortnight program, DOC NYC, and was exhibited as a storefront installation at Artist Television Access in San Francisco.

For his work-in-progress live documentary performance, Untitled Frank Moore Project, he was a BAVC National Mediamaker Fellow and a Points North Institute Fellow. He was the producer, director of photography and editor of Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary feature directed by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that premiered at documenta14 in Kassel, Germany. He was Director of Photography and Producer for INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR., which premiered at Sundance and was released theatrically by Strand Releasing. He is a member-owner New Day Films, a 40 year-old documentary distribution cooperative.

Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the Entertainment & Media Studies Department at the University of Georgia, has an MFA in film production from the Radio-TV-Film Department at UT-Austin, and grew up on a cul-de-sac in suburban Atlanta.

 

Click here for Part 1. Click here for Part 3.