Presented by Access:Horror
Guest appearance and Q&A with Monstrous Me director Ariel Baska + additional Monstrous Me cast and crew.
Includes the following documentary films:
Becoming Benjamin Lay
Director: Tony Buba
Runtime: 54 minutes
“Becoming Benjamin Lay” follows the journey actor Mark Povinelli takes in adapting his one person show “The Return of Benjamin Lay” for a performance before the Little People of America conference in Baltimore in 2024. Benjamin Lay a dwarf was born in 1682 in Copford, England and died in Pennsylvania in 1759. He was a man centuries ahead of his time: a radical Quaker, a fierce abolitionist, and a relentless truth-teller. He stood barely four feet tall, yet he towered morally over the society that condemned him. His story challenges us to confront our own complacency and to imagine what moral courage might look like today.
Trailer
Who Will Love Me When You Die?
Director: Beatrice Leong
Runtime: 29 minutes
What happens when you confront your own ghosts and return, after years of estrangement, to the place where silence first took hold? An autistic activist returns to her mother, where love and fear shaped two lives in the shadow of a hidden disability. Choices made to protect echo quietly across time, altering what is remembered and what remains unsaid. As past and present fold into each other, misdiagnosis, erasure and unspoken grief surface not as moments, but as ways of being. The story lingers on what it means to keep going when life is shaped by fear, and what remains when a mother and a daughter begin to find a shared language for their love.
Monstrous Me
Director: Ariel Baska
Runtime: 15 minutes
A multiply disabled filmmaker explores the untold power of horror cinema in shaping disability and gender identity - challenging how society sees cinematic monsters. Monstrous Me is a project rooted firmly in Ariel’s questioning of disability representation. Horror, as a genre, has always held a mirror to society's darkest fears and prejudices. It has a unique ability to amplify societal biases, laying them bare for audiences to confront.
MONSTROUS ME is nominated for the Lost Weekend Best Documentary Short Award