My Eyes Are Up Here is an odyssey to get the morning after pill. How could a short film be an odyssey? When a disabled woman of color needs to travel to a pharmacy for the morning after pill, the number of obstacles and quick assumptions she has to face parallels those of Odysseus. The short film was part of the 2023 Bentonville Film Festival – a festival focused on promoting underrepresented voices in entertainment.
A high-profile model Sonya (Jillian Mercado) wakes up from a one-night stand with a clumsy man named Tom (Ben Cura). Quickly, they discover that she will need to take the morning after pill, so Sonya begins the journey to get it with Tom as her unwanted sidekick. As Sonya goes about her business, you witness the numerous ableist situations and people Sonya has to deal with every day. There is only an unstable makeshift ramp to get out of Tom’s building. The ride-sharing service is inaccessible. Obnoxious women will not move their shopping bags out of the accessible area on the bus. None of these moments are surprising to Sonya, as they are the reality of being visibly disabled in our society. However, through Tom’s now-open eyes, a day in the life for Sonya is an extensive journey.
There is a long problematic history of non-disabled people having opinions about disabled women’s reproductive rights. This short demonstrates how that history has seeped into the world today – whether people actively realize it or not. When Sonya says, “I can’t get pregnant,” Tom assumes she means she physically can’t get pregnant and has to be corrected. Her modeling agent at first cannot understand that Sonya spent the night, and then assumes she was taken advantage of. Even the pharmacist, who clearly has a relationship with Sonya, initially asks who the pill is for. There also are more direct moments of ableism, such as when those same obnoxious women on the bus loudly question Tom about Sonya’s abilities the night before.
These brief moments show how false assumptions innately exist in the non-disabled world. The way to correct it is through creating short films like My Eyes Are Up Here. As we see more people with disabilities in a variety of romantic relationships in media, we will begin to write over the current beliefs and form new ones.
The short succeeds because people with disabilities were involved both in front of and behind the camera at every step of the process. The short was co-written by Aminder Virde, a disabled South Asian multi-hyphenate. She wanted to make a day-in-the-life story that many women could relate to, but show how that day gets complicated when you’re a disabled woman. Once Jillian Mercado was attached, the script was adapted to better reflect Mercado’s own lived experience as a power wheelchair user. Additionally, Producer Vanessa Muir, having had a stroke a few years before, used her own experience to inform all aspects of production. They were “committed to accommodating the needs of the cast and crew…and worked to ensure that [their] production and costume design were accessible, and wouldn’t interfere with closed captions.” They also consulted others with lived experience when it came to providing audio description and addressing other accessibility needs in the distribution of the film. These people ensured authentic storytelling and an overall better story.
As a wheelchair user myself, this was an enjoyable and relatable film. It was particularly interesting to watch Tom try to do the right thing and for the most part get it wrong. He overstepped multiple times trying to offer help. He inappropriately put his hand on Sonya’s chair on the bus not realizing that he was invading her personal space. However, as the film went on, he started to figured things out and support Sonya in appropriate ways such as getting her a straw when he picked up coffee. Yes, there was a lot of unintentional ableism on display in the film’s story, but it was cool to see non-disabled people intentionally learn and correct themselves. But what stood out the most was Jillian Mercado’s excellent acting and subtle moments of comedy. I would have liked one moment of disability humor where she said, “actually my eyes are down here,” but other than that, I highly recommend you watch My Eyes Are Up Here.
