Sundance rejected it. So did the Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Festival, and the prestigious Sheffield DocFest in the U.K., according to the filmmakers – director Nick August-Perna and executive producer Louis Theroux.
“I was like, what the f*ck?” Theroux remembers thinking after all the rejections. August-Perna recalls, “It was painful, it was annoying. I think we all felt that we’d made something really special.”
Derrick “D.J.” Johnson (left) with his brother John.
The film explores the unsettling case of Dr. Anna Stubblefield, a white Rutgers University philosophy professor and disability theorist who began working with Derrick Johnson, a non-verbal Black man with cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities, using a scientifically questionable method to help him communicate. That method, called Facilitated Communication, involves supporting the hand of a person with motor skill issues so they can point to letters on a board or tap letters on a keyboard to express thoughts.
Under Anna’s tutelage, Derrick (or D.J., as he is sometimes called) went from being someone whose thoughts could not be divined to communicating complex ideas. “He was a really fast learner,” she says in the film.
Then, things took a strange turn. Stubblefield told Derrick’s family that her student had tapped out words revealing he loved her. The feeling was mutual. “I am in love with him,” she told Derrick’s devoted mom Daisy and equally devoted older brother John. What’s more, Anna revealed she and D.J. had consummated their relationship, once on the floor of Daisy’s house.
Derrick’s mother and brother soon reported the conduct to police. Stubblefield was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault. At trial, the judge disallowed expert testimony about Facilitated Communication. The professor was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. But on appeal, a higher court ruled the trial judge had erred in not allowing FC evidence because, without it, a jury could not assess Derrick’s level of consent to the sexual liaison. Anna pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served two years behind bars before being released.
Thus, it’s a story that features sex, true crime, race, power imbalances, white-saviorism, and disability. Dynamite, right? So why wouldn’t leading film festivals touch it? The filmmakers point to the last in that string of nouns – disability.
“I have a theory,” Theroux shares, “that the things that made the festivals uncomfortable are related to the things that made the film successful, which is that it is thorny and, in a sense, politically inconvenient that it’s not an unadulterated good news story about disability. And I think that’s awkward… I think maybe festival programmers felt, well, this is bad news about people with disabilities and what do we do with that? But what they didn’t see is actually this is a story in which we have a Black person who’s been potentially the victim of a sexual assault, and this is an important story to connect with. And absolutely it carries an extraordinary electric charge, as it turns out, for the audiences.”
The festival rejections didn’t come without comment, August-Perna notes. “There were carefully written emails about why and sort of hedging all kinds of reasons – ‘Oh, if you just talked a bit more about race and a little bit less about this and a bit more about disability.’ Like, you don’t typically get notes from festivals that are from an EP giving you editorial that would’ve made it more palatable for them to just put on their roster.”
August-Perna adds, “It just all seemed odd. Something seemed not right about it.”
Eventually, though, the Hamptons International Film Festival in New York accepted the film, premiering it last October. Tell Them You Love Me won the festival’s Golden Starfish Award for best documentary feature. Two weeks later, it played at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey where it also won Best Documentary. It went on to win prizes at the Sedona International Film Festival in Arizona and the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Impact Doc Awards.
Louis Theroux
When it came to securing wider release of the film – theatrical and streaming – there were other challenges to the sales pitch: the film doesn’t provide tidy conclusions about wrongdoing or even on the question of whether Derrick truly displayed latent communication abilities that were magically unlocked by Dr. Stubblefield.
“It was Sky Documentaries [in the U.K.] who he came on board to fully commission it, and credit to them,” comments Executive Producer Arron Fellows. “I think what they were interested in and the element which we wanted to embrace, was the fact that there were certain ambiguities. It was the sense that there was a very established set of events that happened over a timeline, [from] two very different viewpoints.”
Topic and Kino Lorber came on board the project, and then sales agent Submarine approached Netflix about making a home for the film.
“We always knew we wanted it to have a big U.S. release,” Fellows says. “Netflix saw value in it being on their platform, and I think everyone was delighted with the response, much of which was word of mouth. People wanted to discuss it on social media.”
A sampling of viewer reaction on Twitter/X: “I can’t get the story out of my brain,” wrote Morgan Jenkins. “Craziest shit I’ve seen all year,” said The Flyest Nobody. Wrote @Sades1888, “Holy shit, Tell Them You Love Me is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen.”
Theroux, the U.K.-based filmmaker, has been through this kind of rejection-embrace scenario before, especially with 2015’s My Scientology Movie . Festivals say no, fans say yes.
“What I did know and was able to say to Nick and the rest of the team was, I’ve been here before, and this is no reflection of the quality of the film, genuinely. I sometimes think festivals have a blind spot… or at least they don’t always have the best sense of what’s going to connect with an audience,” Theroux postulates. “I’m not quite sure what their metric is for choosing their films, but I do know that they’re not always choosing the films that most people want to see. And I’m basing that on the success of My Scientology Movie , mainly. And now the success of Tell Them You Love Me .”
Mindhouse, the production company Theroux co-founded with Arron Fellows and Nancy Strang, looks for a particular kind of project.
“We’re interested, I think, in cultural fault lines that are hard to navigate and that you kind of are in this place of irresolution,” Theroux says. “A person of good conscience who’s trying to do their best can occupy two different points of view seemingly simultaneously. And I think that’s very much where this film fits.”
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