The How We Look Project

On April 27, 2026, The How We Look Project arrives as a collection of three short narrative films, each created and performed by Little People, examining how dwarfs have been seen — and have seen themselves — across centuries of image-making practices.

The three films share a structural conceit that gives the project its coherence: each one positions a specific technology of representation at its center, not as backdrop but as the animating problem. In Court, set in 1572 Italy, a Court Dwarf named Fabio sits for a painted portrait while enduring the discomforts of that prolonged, objectifying act. In Carnival, a woman named Jessica and her "Midget troupe" pose for a souvenir postcard in 1924, a moment that frames them explicitly as commodities for an outside gaze. In Appointment, set apparently in the present, three Little People who all share the name Avery sit before a physician more absorbed by his own medical imaging technology than by the patients themselves. Renaissance portraiture, sideshow photography, clinical imaging — together these three modes span roughly four and a half centuries of institutionalized looking, and the project seems to be asking what has and hasn't changed across that span.

What makes the formal architecture worth noting is that these are not documentaries, not oral histories, not essay films. They are narrative fiction, with characters, dramatic situations, and what appear to be genuinely stakes-driven plots. Carnival is perhaps the most legible as a story in the conventional sense: Jessica's compliance with commodification is also, the project's description suggests, a calculated act — the postcard a possible vehicle for reaching a disappeared lover, a way of using the very mechanism of exploitation to make contact with the outside world. The tension between submission to an image and the exercise of agency within it is not a subtle theme, but the specific dramatic form — a 1924 postcard session with an absent lover as the true audience — gives it a concreteness that an essay or documentary could not easily provide.

Court operates on a longer temporal axis. Fabio's discomfort during the sitting is less about immediate social negotiation than about a kind of address across time: he wonders, as the description frames it, whether the finished image might serve as a communication to future dwarfs. This is a recognizable idea in discussions of historical marginalized communities — the notion that representation, even coerced or condescending representation, can function as a form of transmission — but placing it inside a dramatized scene of a specific man in a specific moment of physical endurance gives it an intimacy that a thesis statement would not. Whether the film earns that intimacy is, of course, unknown until the films can be seen.

Appointment is the most stripped of historical costuming, and in some ways the most directly polemical in its premise: the doctor's fascination with his own technology over the people in front of him is a fairly direct dramatization of a critique of medical objectification. The choice to give all three patients the same name, Avery, is a formal decision that invites attention — it might suggest interchangeability as experienced from the outside, or some form of solidarity as experienced from within, or both — but what the film actually does with that device remains to be seen.

The project's insistence on being created and performed by Little People is not incidental context. The entire premise — examining how LPs have been pictured across history — would carry a substantially different weight if it were made by filmmakers outside that community. The choice to center image-making as the subject, while insisting on LP authorship and performance as the method, sets up an implicit argument about the difference between being looked at and looking back. Whether the films make that argument through form or through dialogue or through something harder to categorize is among the more interesting open questions.

There are practical questions the available information doesn't answer. The total runtime of the three films together is unspecified, as is the distribution context — whether The How We Look Project is intended for festival circulation, streaming, theatrical presentation, or some combination. The production background, the names of those behind the camera, and the specific creative lineage of the project are not part of what's currently available. What can be said is that the thematic ambition — a triptych spanning 1572, 1924, and the present, each installment using a different historical image technology to examine LP identity and self-representation — is unusually coherent for a short film collection.

The audience most likely to seek this out early includes viewers already interested in disability studies and its intersections with visual culture, as well as those drawn to short film collections that use period setting as a way of making arguments about the present. The drama genre designation in the metadata undersells the project's apparent conceptual rigor; this is not prestige melodrama but something closer to what might be called conceptual narrative cinema — films that proceed from ideas but, at least in intention, don't let the ideas substitute for character and situation.