In one of her poems from the collection Love Letter from the Afterlife, Andrea Gibson writes, “Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?”
These are not the idle musings of someone for whom death is a distant and vaguely unreal prospect. For the past several years, the poet laureate of Colorado has confronted a life-threatening illness after their diagnosis with stage 4 ovarian cancer. The story of how Gibson and her partner, spoken word poet Meg Falley, have faced this existential challenge together — choosing to live joyously, to laugh, and most of all to remain full of love – is told in the award-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light.
Director Ryan White brought his film to the prestigious DC/DOX festival in the nation’s capital Saturday night, participating in a Q&A afterwards.
“This film more so than anything, is a love story more than a cancer story,” he told the capacity audience.
The screening happened shortly after Pres. Trump’s military parade/birthday celebration in DC — timing not lost on the filmmaker.
“I hope this film is kind of counter programming for what’s happening down the road,” White noted. “Andrea and Meg have this magic quality, I think they’re real unicorns of documentary subjects in being so raw in all emotions… Every scene that we shot carried the whole gamut of emotion… I was handed incredible documentary subjects that could weave in and out of hilarity and sadness and wisdom, all within a three-minute scene. So, the challenge was actually fitting it into a feature film.”
White and a small film team followed Gibson and Falley as Andrea (who uses they/them pronouns) completed multiple rounds of intensive chemotherapy treatment.
“It really was building this tiny little family around them,” the filmmaker observed. “We couldn’t get permission to film in the hospital with like a real crew and camera because it would be disruptive to so many other cancer patients. Often it was just [Director of Photography] Brandon [Somerhalder] going into the chemo rooms or when they would get results, [filming] just with an iPhone. He became part of the fabric, like a shoulder to cry on. He would be there for a four-hour chemo session with them when I would just wait in the waiting room to not be disruptive.”
White added, “It was for me a very, very vulnerable way of filmmaking where you love your subjects and they’re loving you back and they’re trusting you completely… They allowed us to film everything, an extreme amount of trust letting you into such a painful journey.”
Audiences have responded rapturously to the film, moved by the intimacy of the storytelling and its surprising balance of poignancy and humor. Come See Me in the Good Light won the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance as voted on by festival attendees; it likewise won audience awards at Hot Docs in Toronto and the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the People’s Choice Award at the Boulder International Film Festival in Colorado.
Some viewers of a more conservative stripe, who might typically reject LGBTQ people in the abstract, have found themselves won over by the story.
“I can’t imagine anyone watching this film and not wanting the best for Andrea and Meg,” White said. “A lot of folks have come up after [screenings] to talk about that and say, ‘I love them so much, how are they doing?’ And people who thought they were on one side of these politicized issues around queer and trans issues fell in love with Andrea and Meg watching it. And I think that’s the magic of Andrea as well. They’re so disarming in that way and that’s what’s so disarming about their poetry. It is so accessible. The way they write poetry invites everybody in and hopefully in our documentary Andrea’s personality is inviting people that might be — I will just say — on the wrong side of that, over to the right side.”
As Deadline reported in April, Apple TV+ acquired the documentary and plans to debut it on the platform in the fall. Among the team behind the film is producer Tig Notaro, the stand-up comedian who is a close friend of Gibson and Falley, executive producer Brandi Carlile – also a close friend of the couple — and executive Sara Bareilles, a longtime fan of Gibson’s poetry slam performances. Musicians Carlile and Bareilles, both multiple Grammy winners, co-wrote a song with Gibson that closes the film, with Bareilles handling the vocals in the version of the documentary that screened Saturday night. But the director revealed there will be an update to the closing song by the time the film premieres on Apple TV+.
“We have a new version that will be coming out that’s a duet, because it is a love song,” he noted. “It is a duet between Sara and Brandi where they each take a verse and harmonize on the chorus and that song will come out later in the year.”
The Apple TV+ release will bring the film to a huge potential audience, widening the opportunity for more people to fall in love with Andrea and Meg.
“The more we shot, the more we realized this is not a film about death. This is a film about living,” White commented. “It is inspiring us, the crew while we’re making it.”
The post “Hilarity And Sadness And Wisdom”: Award-Winning Documentary ‘Come See Me In The Good Light’ Lights Up DC/DOX Festival appeared first on Deadline.
