When Jason DaSilva was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at twenty-five, he responded in the only way that made sense to him: he started making a film about it. Seven years of shooting produced When I Walk (2013), a documentary in which DaSilva placed himself squarely at the center, unflinching in his depiction of the disease's relentless progression, his shrinking mobility in a New York that wasn't always welcoming, and an unexpected love story with Alice Cook. The film, dense with emotional weight, screened at Sundance and found an even wider audience through a television version that won an Emmy Award.
You don't need to have seen it to follow the second chapter of this intimate narrative, When We Walk (2019), which has just begun circulating at festivals worldwide and finally arrived in Italy. But it helps. The film opens in medias res; in the opening minutes, DaSilva recaps his story and bridges back to the end of the first film, revealing that he and Alice had a son, Jase, but that their marriage did not survive. Knowing the earlier film gives you context. Not knowing it won't leave you lost.
Again, DaSilva remains constantly at the film's center. But this time the emotional engine is not romantic love—Alice fades into the background, her role as co-protagonist displaced—but rather fatherhood. What might seem a purely personal story, however, opens into something larger. DaSilva navigates a complicated family situation that forces him to examine the systems that support seriously ill patients across America, and the rights a disabled parent can claim when a marriage ends.
If the first documentary was made largely for himself, this second one is structured as a letter to his son—not just to show Jase how deeply loved he was, but to transmit through images stories and feelings that illness might otherwise silence. For DaSilva, keeping an artistic project alive is a way of moving forward despite his body's relentless decline. It's as if the act of filming every possible moment—staying before the camera twenty-four hours a day—gives him strength and more time to spend with his son.
But When We Walk is more than therapy or a gift to his child. It is also an act of witness: Americans understand the failures of their healthcare system only when disability touches them directly. DaSilva is not finished. He still wants to live, and to make films. The third in his trilogy, When They Walk, will document his work developing assistive technologies for people with mobility challenges.