Though avant-garde filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) was born in and began his filmmaking career in New York alongside contemporaries Andy Warhol and Robert Frank, a Fulbright Scholarship took him to London in 1964 and led him to a life outside the US, where he worked primarily in the UK and Germany on independent projects and commissions for television. Living his adult life with post-polio syndrome after contracting the virus at age 9, Dwoskin walked with crutches and eventually used a wheelchair, and the reality of his body thematically works its way into many of his uncategorizable films, including his autobiographical Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994), the lyrical documentary Face of Our Fear (1992), and the hauntingly subjective Behindert (1974).  

Deriving its title from the German word for “disabled,” Dwoskin’s deeply personal masterpiece Behindert finds the filmmaker’s gaze replicated through the lens of a 16mm camera, bearing first-person witness to a budding romance between a man with physical disabilities and an able-bodied woman. Casting his then-ex-girlfriend Carola Regnier as the love interest aids in generating the film’s overwhelming, indescribable pathos, and the minimalist drone score by English composer Gavin Bryars imparts a haunting tone to this passionate and arresting film by a singularly visionary artist. An official selection of the Director’s Fortnight section of the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, Behindert is daring, revelatory, and unmissable.