WHO DO WE HAVE HERE?

By the time Jennifer Wallace was four months old, a small birthmark on her cheek had metamorphosed into a blood-filled tumor the size of a grapefruit that covered the right side of her face. With only the slightest cut, she could have bled to death. 

After being dismissed by many doctors and losing hope, Jennifer’s family met Dr. Milton Edgerton, Chief of Plastic Surgery at the University of Virginia. He was the only doctor who would risk taking her case, eventually performing 16 of the 20 operations to rebuild her face over 20 years. With profound awareness that healing the physical body can heal the emotional body, he used his talents with a scalpelto minimize the cruel teasing she suffered daily. Currently in production, Who Do We Have Here, is a feature length documentary exploring Dr. Edgerton’s legacy through the lens of director Jennifer Wallace and his former patients who bear the same physical and emotional scars of living with deformity.

At age 42, Jennifer has worked hard to create a fulfilling life with a successful career, many friends and a loving family, yet she still feels like something is missing. She longs for a sense of kinship that her friends and family cannot provide. Jennifer sets out on a journey to connect with others like her who have struggled with physical difference since birth and along the way discovers the significant role their surgeon played in shaping all that we know plastic surgery to be today.  

Dr. Edgerton, now 96-years old, reveals that he took Jennifer’s case because he knew that feeling set apart physically can cause chronic emotional stress, that “deformity is dis-ease.” He was the first full time plastic surgeon in the United States and the first to embed psychologists in his clinic in the 1940s. Because of this collaboration, he transformed how plastic surgery was performed and on whom. He accepted complex, untouchable cases, and, ignoring social taboos, performed some of the first transgender operations in the 1950s and founded the first multi-disciplinary transgender surgery clinic in the United States in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Edgerton knew that no matter why someone feels different physically, “cutting the body can heal the mind.”He was a technical master in the operating room but a pariah for his philosophy of which patients to treat and why. Jennifer, his other patients and Dr. Edgerton all struggled with mustering the endurance needed to live lives dealing with themes of vulnerability, authenticity and leadership.

Using vivid 8mm film footage from Jennifer’s childhood, as well as conversations with former patients and the surgeons and psychologists who worked next to Dr. Edgerton, Who Do We Have Here, explores the universal search for belonging and standing on the lonely leading edge of leadership. The film employs a traditional cinema véritéapproach combined with a dramatic narrative aesthetic. Executing striking composition with a 2:35 aspect ratio, the resulting frame has the cinematic richness of narrative film while giving the viewer unique access into the lives of Jennifer and her medical cousins, former patients of Dr. Edgerton’s.