Stanford Report, June 10, 2005

Professor's documentary to be broadcast

Big Enough, a sequel to film about the lives of dwarves, explores impacts of disability rights movement; will air on KQED June 28

Big Enough, an award-winning documentary by Jan Krawitz, a professor of communication who teaches in the graduate program in documentary film and video, will make its national broadcast premiere on the public television program P.O.V. on June 28.

The film is a sequel to Krawitz's 1982 Emmy-nominated documentary Little People, which looked at the lives and experiences of dwarves. For Big Enough, Krawitz revisited the lives of five subjects she had filmed two decades earlier. In the sequel, she explored topics including the impact of the implementation of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the effect of the identification in 1994 of the gene for achondroplasia, which causes the most common kind of dwarfism. Krawitz also looked at the issue of "second-generation" dwarfism—how the experience of dwarf children growing up with dwarf parents might differ from the experience of their parents, who had been raised in average-sized families, she said in an interview on the P.O.V. program website.

Krawitz, who produced, edited and directed the film, received a seed grant for the film project from the Office of Technology Licensing. A former student of Krawitz's, Ferne Pearlstein, was the film's cinematographer. Krawitz has been independently producing and directing documentary films since 1975. Her work has won major international awards and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Krawitz has taught at Stanford since 1988.

The film will be broadcast at 10 p.m. June 28 on KQED in San Francisco. For other stations and broadcast times, and for additional information about Big Enough, see the P.O.V. program website at http://www.pbs.org/pov/.