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“The Onus Always Comes Back to Producers’ Creativity”: Producer Colleen Cassingham on Life After
Still from Life After. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Life After is an investigation into the whereabouts of Elizabeth Bouvia, whose request for medically assisted in dying in 1983 kicked off a debate that still rages today. The film is Reid Davenport’s follow-up to the 2022 Sundance film I Didn’t See You There and screens as part of the festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition.
The film is also the first producer credit for Colleen Cassingham. Below, she talks about being challenged by her film’s subject matter, navigating conundrums of documentary ethics, and the overlapping crises in the industry.
See all responses to our annual Sundance first-time producer interviews here.
Filmmaker: How did you connect with this filmmaker and wind up producing the film?
Cassingham: When Reid reached out to Multitude Films about producing his second feature, I couldn’t believe my luck. His debut, I Didn’t See You There, was one of my favorite films of the last few years—one of those projects where you just think to yourself, “I wish I had produced that.” The chance to work with Reid as an artist and a thinker was not something I was going to pass up. But what Reid was interested in exploring with Life After really challenged me. It revealed a huge, uncomfortable cognitive dissonance within me. As a person with leftist politics, I’m deeply committed to issues of bodily autonomy, and I believed I knew where I stood on the issue of assisted dying: I was 100 percent for it. But I had never really examined that belief, and Reid’s perspective cracked open my own biases and assumptions.
I had thought the issue of assisted dying centered on individual choice, but it became rightfully more complex when examined from a disability standpoint. From our earliest research, through the chaos of delivering to Sundance, collaborating with Reid has been so nourishing. Despite the heavy subject matter of the film, our working dynamic brought so much laughter and humor, generous exchange, trust and care, triumphant breakthroughs, mutual respect, and solidarity: in short, some of the antidotes to the dystopia at hand. I’m so grateful he brought me along, and I want all my future partnerships with directors to be as richly collaborative as this one has been.
Filmmaker: Did you have important or impactful mentors, or support from organizations, that were instrumental in your development as a producer?
Cassingham: I’ve come up in this industry primarily under the wing of Multitude Films, a nonfiction production company dedicated to telling nonfiction stories by and about historically excluded and underrepresented communities. Soon after Jess Devaney founded the company back in 2016, I reached out as a fresh-faced grad and asked to work for her. I started out as a PA, then associate producer, and am now lead producing projects. My love for the documentary form has always been intertwined with thinking about knowledge and power, so Multitude has been exactly the kind of producing home I wanted because our team is invested in countering the colonial heritage of documentary. I’ve cut my teeth on projects that illuminate structural forces of oppression, helmed by directors telling stories about their own communities from the inside out. So producing Life After as my first feature has been a rich continuation of those values.
My colleagues and mentors at Multitude have deeply shaped me—not just professionally, but personally and politically. Jess has been continuously invested in my growth as a producer—and more than that, has strategically found or created opportunities for me to take on new challenges and stretch myself and to trust in myself as my most powerful asset. The values-based producing practice, culture, and infrastructure we’ve built at Multitude Films feels rare and precious.
For Life After specifically, I was honored to be selected as a 2023-2024 Sundance Producing Fellow, a year-long opportunity where I got to soak up the masterful wisdom of producing giants like Andrea Meditch, Diane Quon and many others; engage in an extended dialogue with my mentor and role model Sara Archambault, which I hope will never end; share community, knowledge and friendship with the four brilliant women in my cohort; and be showered with the care and probing patience of Sundance’s Kristin Feeley and Maria Clement. It was an experience that pushed me, made me uncomfortable and prickly at times and ultimately was crucial to helping me step into my own as a producer.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult aspect of producing this film?
Cassingham: The most difficult aspect, which was also the highest-stakes, was creating and implementing an ethics of care with our participants. Some of the folks we were exploring filming with were in very vulnerable situations—for example, disabled folks in Canada who were contemplating accessing Medical Aid in Dying, often for economic reasons. We created a sort of rubric to gauge who it was ethical and safe to even reach out to, given the impact that participating in a documentary would have on their lives.
From early production, we worked with Dr. Kameelah Oseguera, who is the head of care at Multitude Films and a member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group. She coached and advised me and Reid through navigating our relationships and communication with participants with care, transparency, authenticity and healthy boundaries. She helped us determine how to compensate participants for their time and energy, location access and archival materials without that compensation being coercive. And then she was also a hands-on resource to the participants, offering care sessions before and after production interviews and in the leadup to our premiere at Sundance.
Filmmaker: What are the challenges facing new producers entering the business right now at this unique historical moment? And what could or should change about the film business to make producing a more sustainable practice?
Cassingham: Right now, most indie documentary producers are acutely feeling the pressure and pains of the consolidation of distribution avenues. Paired with funders’ anxiety and fear around the election results and the general constriction of philanthropic funding, it’s becoming harder and harder to envision how we’ll continue to produce and distribute artful, politically committed documentary films. As much as we talk about sustainability in this business, the onus always comes back to producers’ creativity to make it work.
For example, our team at Multitude is really thinking about how we can build out our distribution muscle in-house and manage as many of our films’ rights ourselves, how we can have direct access to our audiences and build them across our films. But we need all the other stakeholders to resource our creativity, whether that’s taking distribution into our own hands, or slate financing or the myriad innovations and coalition-building that producers are leading in our field. Producers in our ecosystem have a lot of great ideas, and what we really need is for those ideas to be resourced, and swiftly.
