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Far From the Tree — the documentary adaptation of Andrew Solomon’s landmark study of difference within families, coming to the Doc NYCfestival this week — explores the porous, ever-shifting line between “illness” and “identity.”
In the 2012 book, Solomon talks to over 300 families in which the children differ from their parents in some fundamental way: deaf children born to hearing parents, gay children born to straight parents, dwarfs born to parents of average size. Far From The Tree explores how families come to grapple with difference, as well as the new peer communities formed by people with these “horizontal identities,” his term for when “someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and
must therefore acquire identity from a peer group.”
In one particularly affecting section of the film, we are introduced to a community of dwarfs at the annual Little People of America conference, who explain how they see new scientific attempts to “cure” and subsequently eradicate dwarfism as an assault on their community and an invalidation of their identities. In the exclusive clip below, the film offers a window into the life of dwarf couple Joe Stramondo and Leah Smith, which, contrary to popular belief, is not beset by the desire to be “normal.”