‘Take Me Home’ Director Liz Sargent on a New Kind of Disability Storytelling (Guest Column)
When I set out to make my short film Take Me Home, I wanted to raise questions about our responsibilities to family as we grow older. The film captures a feared transitional moment for families that include a loved one who cannot live on their own: What is inherited? How do we navigate the hurdles of the American health care system when we are living on the margins of life?
I grew up as the middle child of 11. My adoptive parents had four biological children, then adopted seven more — six of whom are Korean, several with disabilities. We grew up in a John Hughes-esque suburb of America on a picturesque street. Our family stood out whether we liked it or not. Inside the house, however, adoption and disability were the norm. Everyone was the same, because everyone was different.
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In this fast, competitive world, I think often about my youngest sibling, Anna, who has a cognitive developmental disability, and how the world isn’t made for her. When Anna was born weighing 2 pounds, her doctors didn’t think she would make it, so they didn’t do anything for her. She developed a cyst on her frontal lobe, which left her with little short-term memory. But there is an immeasurable depth of lived experience behind her eyes.
Filmmaking is where I work out the conversations that I’m afraid to have in real life — the grounded harrowing unknown.
Take Me Home centers on two sisters — one disabled, the other not — as they must work through their relationship after the death of their mother. Originally, it focused on the struggles of the able-bodied sibling: a heroic sister with a big, visionary heart. But the script turned into a familiar Hollywood cliché, until I realized that it’s the disabled sibling’s perspective that is the untold story. Because the film is written in my sister’s voice, in words and phrases and interactions that I’ve witnessed, I couldn’t imagine anyone but Anna acting in the project.
But how do you make a film set accessible to someone who thinks differently? On most movie productions, a script is broken down into a million little scenes and filmed out of order. The setup can take longer than the actors are given to work out the performance. My background in modern dance and experimental theater taught me how to have flexible processes, to let scenes breathe and find the story through the body and reactions.
There was care in every choice we made. Our shooting location was Anna’s actual home, where she lives with my parents. My mother plays a version of herself; she has aged into disability, and the film also shifted around her health conditions. We leaned into both of our actors’ needs to allow them to shine and used those challenges to lead the way. My husband, Minos Papas, is also my producer and DP. Minos’ intimate, lyrical camerawork was intuitive, because he understands Anna. My sister Molly was an associate producer; because we are co-guardians to Anna, we were in tune with Anna’s challenges and strengths.
Sets can be total chaos, but Anna was comfortable throughout
because the crew was the same size as our childhood family. By the end, Anna was calling “cut” and telling me what to do. My biggest challenge was to know when to protect my sister and when to trust that she could figure it out herself. As the youngest of 11 siblings who now lives with her aging parents, Anna constantly has her sentences and tasks finished for her — it is a “helpful” disservice. But on set, Anna was engaged, challenged and stimulated because the crew worked for her and she could sense she was a leader.
In the film, Anna must find a way to communicate her autonomy while her sister overhauls her home. But Anna is not a plot device or a supporting character; the audience is forced to listen to the space in between Anna’s unique way of speaking. We don’t define her disability in the film; rather, we force the audience to lean in and listen to her, to consider her psychology. The music was created to amplify Anna’s unique way of thinking: It is arrhythmic, sparse but clear, and maintains the “out of place” notes. We do not objectify her — we are with her.
Take Me Home provokes conversation around the ethical dilemmas of caregiving, but it’s really about capability amid disability. Without changing Anna’s cognitive disability, we show that she is the smartest person in the room.
We grew up in an affluent suburb, but my parents gave everything they had to their children and now live on Social Security, barely meeting their needs. Making movies is hard without connections or trust funds, and these kinds of creative choices are not always supported by the big studios, who might see challenges as risks. Take Me Home was poetically built on luck and love; Asian women like executive producers Julia S. Gouw, Janet Yang, the all-woman team at Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE), Jane Shin Park, June Bayha, Cindy Y. Huang, as well as Ginny Millhiser, made this path possible. They saw the potential for this film to impact the worlds of entertainment and education, and even potentially influence policy.
People sometimes call Take Me Home a doc-narrative hybrid, but that is demeaning to Anna’s agency as a performer — she knows real from pretend. Seeing Anna celebrated on the big screen as a three-dimensional, grounded human has been the most rewarding thing I have ever experienced. People fall in love with Anna — they are curious about her, they identify with her. And if you love her, you will fight for her.
This story first appeared in a November standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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