Ashley Eakin’s journey to Netflix & SXSW winning director is no simple tale and one she doesn’t let define her.
Her limb-difference cannot be categorised as a familiar one, either. Born with a rare bone disease called Olliers as well as Maffuci Syndrome, it caused almost all of Ashley’s limbs to grow differently, resulting in over thirty corrective surgeries.
“I had enchondromas and a lot of benign tumours that cause the bones to grow differently,” Ashley said. “So, like, my hands are different as are my legs. In my time I’ve a lot of surgeries on several parts of my body.”
You’ll have seen multiple examples of limb-difference on the DIA. However, Ashley’s really isn’t a straight-forward limb difference. Despite the difference, the similarity in upbringing will ring truth in familiarity for many.
Like many others, Eakin grew up not knowing anyone with her bone disease - or knowing anyone with any kind of different body or disability for that matter. Representation matters, and in a world before the true power of the internet that we see today, it didn’t take much make you feel on your own and very visible to the masses of the world outside.
“I think that’s something that gave me a lot of shame around it,” Ashley candidly explained. “I was really ashamed of how my body was shaped. I would hide it a lot and not want to talk about it. I remember in middle school, friends would always ask what happened as if there was some kind of accident, which would make me freeze up and run to the bathroom to cry.
“As I got older, I would just start hiding it. My disability is one where, if you see me in person, you can tell my body is different, but I can hide it at certain times like wearing a certain jacket, the way I could be sitting and I was becoming obsessed with curating this part of me that appeared non-disabled. Even on social media, I was a master cropper!”
We’ve all been there. Able-bodied or limb-different, we all have our insecurities; our angles, how we like to stand on photographs to get the best version of ourselves across. In formative years, self-acceptance is a long battle of a road. You ask questions about yourself and you try to get comfortable in your own skin. With a disability, the prospect can be worsened.
“I would position myself in ways on group photos where you wouldn’t be able to tell,” analysed Ashley. “It was interesting because in high school I had a lot of friends and a good social life, I was actively dating and so on. Then in college I had a lot of interest from people, but that’s when social media started to come up around 2005 with Facebook just coming out.
“Then I realised I could curate myself a certain way and thought maybe I should keep this stuff out of the photos. I became pretty obsessed with that and it became my identity. I had to confront it in my twenties when I was single after a bad breakup and was devastated. I got thrown in to online dating from there which is a whole thing in itself.
“For instance I would state I had a bone disease in my bio, but my pictures weren’t the clearest or show it on them. It’s two very different experiences because someone can think they’re okay with it in theory, but when they see it they can feel very differently about it.
“I was on this journey to accept it about myself and that’s when I started meeting people in the world with limb-differences and disabilities which began by connecting with people on Facebook. I’d never seen anyone look like me until I met the people in this Facebook group. It was wild.”
For the writer-director, Ashley’s change came when she saw a young girl with a very similar difference to her own in the Facebook group she was part of. While travelling the world as an assistant to Jon M. Chu on the set of Crazy Rich Asians, conquering her goals in the her chosen field, the side of herself being marketed and promoted on social media was much the opposite.
“If you’d have looked at my Instagram, you would not have known I had a difference. I kept thinking about that little girl and wanted to show her and others that you can live life as an adult and that was a very big thing for me.
“I never thought about getting married and having kids and stuff like that because I hadn’t seen people in my situation do it, so I didn’t really think it was possible. I was doing these great things in my career but I felt so alone as there was no real examples to follow for me. I started realising that I needed to be more open, so I did a SoulPancake video which went viral and changed my life.
“There were a lot of people who identified with it and seeing them enabled me to start feeling confident in myself from there.”
Many years later, on a journey much of her own, the Nebraska native decided to study at San Diego State University, majoring in journalism. The newsroom and the hunt for a good story all leading her passion for work in the uber-fast industry.
In the back of her mind, however, the film industry was always in her ear, intriguing her, daring her to make the transition from newsroom to movie set.
“I’d always had an interest in film,” the SINGLE director said. “I was always the one wanting to make movies on the big old video cameras and telling me friends what to do. I took a minor in film while studying, but Hollywood and everything else just felt so far away. I felt I would never fit in that world especially because of my body.”
Some things are just meant to happen. Certain roads are just made to crossover. Coincidentally, it wasn’t until Ashley’s senior year of college when a speaker came in for an inspiring talk that she found a motive, an entry point and a person of relevance.
Ashley filming onset.
“He was talking about being a film distributor in Los Angeles and he had a paralysed arm. It was the first time I ever thought there might be a path for me. I thought ‘He’s successful, he’s working, so why can’t I?’ I started realising I loved stories, television and film and that was what lit a passion under me. I didn’t want to stay working in the news afterwards.
“I was going to go study screenwriting at grad school, but a couple of my mentors told me unless I had the money upfront for film, it might not be the best direction because it is so hard to know if you’re going to have a career in the industry. Unlike a doctor or a lawyer, you know you’ll make that money back. Film is a very unpredictable world.”
Ashley decided to carve her own unconventional path into the movie business, getting stuck right in by working as a production assistant and filling intern work on sets for experience. The first big set Ashley found herself involved with was a movie called I’m In Love with a Church Girl, starring Ja Rule and Adrienne Bailon.
“They had the cranes and everything was big scale. I loved it and knew it was what I wanted to be involved in,” the Disney+ Growing Up guest director told. “I was still thinking about writing and wanting to write films, but it wasn’t until five years after that that I really started to get the courage to try directing which, at the time, there were not many female directors being shown publicly or disabled directors. Typically, it was tall men.
“Directing is a big undertaking. You’re taking a lot of money from a big studio and swearing not to mess it up. Given my difference, my stature and in the minority, it wasn’t easy. I was working as an assistant from company and a producer for another for four years. But if I wanted to be a director, I had to be an assistant and shadow somebody who is a director actively making movies.
Ashley later spent almost half a year in assistant interviews. It was here where she landed her life and career changing opportunity: the assistant to Jon M. Chu. The role was one in which was preparing her for the latest and greatest stages of her career, filling her with confidence and promise in the process.
“He took me to every meeting and I sat next to him during every part of filming to absorb everything about how to direct and how to pitch,” Ashley recalled, positively. “It made me more passionate while being terrified with the pressure that comes with it. It made me realise I could do this, jumped ship from Jon’s work and started raising funds to do my own projects.
On February 17th, 2022, Ashley’s biggest and boldest project finally came before the eyes of the masses: Forgive Us Our Tresspasses is a Netflix endorsed short film that focuses on a young limb-different boy being hunted by Nazis in the peak of World War II as they looked to eliminate persons of difference as part of Adolf Hitler’s Aktion T4 regime.
A bold project indeed, this was a story that spoke to Ashley on a very personal level. It began with Ashley being recommended for Netflix’s Emerging Filmmaker Initiative scheme. Feeling confident about the potential, Eakin submitted her latest aforementioned short film Single for consideration following its award at SXSW in 2020. Fortune would favour Ashley, landing a meeting with the Netflix board.
Ashley wanted to tell a story with a disabled lead character. That much was set in stone. A month or two prior, Ashley and her husband – who was also brought in as a writer on Forgive Us at Ashley’s request - had watched ‘A Hidden Life’ set in World War II about people refusing to be drafted in to support Adolf Hitler’s regime, so what was happening to disabled people during this time?
“That’s when we came across Hitler’s ‘Aktion T4’ and it was horrifying,” Eakin remembered. “I was really upset that I didn’t know about it prior. It makes you think, if you or I were born back then, we would have immediately been in this program and given how far back medicine was then, considering my thirty surgeries, what my functionality level would be at, I knew I’d be in this ‘unperfect pool.’ It was so upsetting.
Eakin’s Netflix Original, now streaming worldwide.
“Parents gave up their kids. Mercy killings even happened to spare the children and prove the parents ‘did their duty.’ I thought what if we turned this story into a hero moment of someone escaping the program. Initially, it was more true to history, but it upset me too much. I didn’t want to have kids with limb-differences watch this and be depressed by it, so a hero moment was much more fitting. If you make someone care for a character and then show them the information, it hits different and that was the goal.
“When pitching ideas, Forgive Us Our Trespasses was one that everyone was surprised by. A lot of people didn’t know about it, so this intrigued us to create something unique that focused on this time in history.”
Just before the credits roll on our newfound limb-different hero sprinting away through the heavily snowy fields of Germany (Canada on location), the viewer finds itself presented with a hard-hitting statement:
In 1939, Hitler implemented Aktion T4, which led to the murder of 300,000 disabled people, while sterilizing an additional 400,000. This secret program developed the gas chamber technology used in concentration camps during WWII.
This history of disabled lives has slowly been forgotten.
A powerful statement echoed by a world still in 2022 that is not fit for purpose nor by design for disabled people. It is not a part of history you would ever discover in the classroom’s syllabus. Even in this day and age, issues surrounding disability are still often frowned upon, pitied or too uncomfortable to broach.
In her life and industry experience, Ashley sees disability as still very much a hushed subject. Despite it being around us in our everyday lives, the sensitivity around it continues to shine light on the barriers prevented by conversation.
“I think disability in general – and I say this through growing up feeling a lot of shame – is taboo,” Ashley stated. “Everybody sees it, everybody knows it’s there but nobody really feels comfortable openly addressing it. People don’t know how to navigate it, so they stray away from it.
“There’s also sometimes a purpose to forgetting certain history because then you don’t have to go look at how we look and treat disabled people and society today. For instance the medical expenses here in America and how ridiculous certain things cost just to exist. We don’t socially accept that. Things just be more affordable. It shouldn’t be you being punished because you were born in a way that you had no control over.
“I think a lot of the history is on the down-low because then you don’t have to address that our society is inherently ablest. I always say, I was an unknown ablest my whole life. I always thought ‘disability, nope, it’s about me’ and I was just going to push it under the rug and not deal with it. A lot of people think it’s just really depressing to learn about and that there’s enough depressing things to learn about already.
“There are ways to talk about it and honour it, but also show people creating things and making life for themselves.”
As acting roles have evolved in recent time, the inclusion of all actors must come with it. For years and years, actors have portrayed the roles of those of limb-difference with little to no insight on how the portrayal is best utilised. Cast your minds back to 2017 and you might remember the backlash on Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston’s The Upside, where Cranston played the role of a wheelchair user and Hart his carer.
The backlash towards the film was hard as many fans felt Cranston’s role could and should’ve been given to a deserved wheelchair-using actor. Since then, studios have been more open to the ideas of using actors with differences instead of CGI. In Ashley’s view, it is time once and for all for fair opportunity for disabled workers.
“I used to be a little more lenient and think, ‘Well, they have to get actors and it’s acting after all,’ but I think you have to take this stance at some point and say no more of it,” Ashley explained. "These are the only roles disabled people can get, often times. It’s their way into the industry for a lot of them. When somebody more established takes it – and they’re going to do it because it’ll bring it more money and sell more rights. They’re not established acts, yes, but that’s because of opportunity and these are the opportunities that should be open to them.
“Yes, it is a business. But business changes and this should be something that does too. If we say no more, we’ll boycott the film, then change occurs. People will have to make those changes. They will have to trust that it will be good enough to bring in an audience naturally. In Crazy Rich Asians, there weren’t a ton of known actors in that, but that film made over $300 million. It did so well because people loved the message and the journey they went on with these characters and that can happen with disabled people too.
“I’m of the frame of mind now of it’s just no more. You can’t put non-disabled people in these films anymore because it also makes our stories and lives seem more of a myth like we aren’t real people that have to deal with specific everyday issues and struggles. Seeing an able-bodied person in there makes the viewer think, ‘Phew, that wasn’t real.’ It’s not the message or the mentality we need to be sending. We need the audience to be like ‘Wow, that’s a real person’s experience’ and also see disabled people achieve things.
“Just last week we saw CODA win at the Oscars. These are real actors who are real people and are very good at their job. People always believe we cannot do things and we continue to combat that. I think now we have to cast authentically and we are seeing it more in Hollywood now. It’s exciting to be able to go into a casting room or meeting and know you’re difference is not going to be a battle or a problem. We know what we want to address and show to the world more than an able-bodied person does, just naturally.
“You can tell in movies when disability has or has not had an input. What’s your game here, y’know? Is it that you just want people to feel bad for us? We don’t want that. The story presentation matters just as much as representation.”
You can watch Forgive Us Our Trespasses - now available worldwide on Netflix.