The Tallest Dwarf

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. Julie explores attitudes about normality and rumors of dwarfism in her own family. When her parents are mystified by her questions, Julie pores through family photos with her father Paul and the two playfully measure themselves following Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man diagram of “perfect” human proportions. The film also highlights LPs who tell their stories of growing up, navigating pregnancy, and finding agency within a medical system that offers hope to some and poses challenges to others.

In search of community and belonging, Julie meets other LPs, each with their own relationship to dwarf identity and medicine. She partners with a group of LP artists in a creative process to confront issues raised by new, controversial pharmaceutical genetic therapies. The cast brings their lived experience to a collaborative workshop that explores the cost of conformity and the experiences of historically being put on display and gawked at in the present-day. Archives offer further context, attending to the echoes of eugenics in modern medicine’s history of “correcting” dwarf and disabled bodies. Through the group’s creative collaboration and the stories of LPs and their families, the film challenges the notion that people should change themselves rather than the structures harming them.