Photo Credit: Lauren Desberg and Slamdance

Salt Lake City, Feb 3 – Juliet Romeo (she/her) is a disabled filmmaker based out of Miami, Florida. Along with being a creative (and 2021 Respectability Lab alumna), Romeo is an advocate for disability representation on screen and accessibility at film festivals. She is the founder and a programmer for Slamdance’s Unstoppable. Unstoppable features films made by filmmakers with visible and invisible disabilities and is exclusively programmed by people with disabilities. This year, Unstoppable held its first in-person showcase while continuing to stream online as it did the previous two years.

During a discussion about her journey to Unstoppable, Romeo recalled a time in 2015 when she was working on her documentary chronicling her personal journey with disability and decided to go to her first film festival. It was the “first time taking a trip where it wasn’t conducive to my disability.”

In the years following, her experiences at film festivals became increasingly worse and she thought there must be a way to step up festivals differently. When her film went into the festival circuit in 2019, she hoped that she would be able to have influence over the accessibility at the festivals that accepted her film. When that didn’t happen, she began writing a proposal for an accessible festival and told a friend the next time I go to a festival “it will be because I have a platform. People will be asking me to speak. People will be driving me door to door.” Four years later, those very things happened at Slamdance. [continue reading…]

Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Washington, D.C., Feb 3 – In her film Slow, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Festival, writer/director Marija Kavtaradze offers a tender study of two messy people’s humanity. Contemporary dancer Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė) meets Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas), who’s assigned to interpret for her class of deaf youth. As their connection deepens, Dovydas discloses that he’s asexual—which takes Elena by surprise. The two individuals then enter a relationship dance testing their boundaries and definitions of sexuality, intimacy, and love.

The film’s analog style is mesmerizing. The slight grain and muted pastel colors evoke nostalgia of a first love, which Kavtaradze emphasizes through her pared-down filmmaking approach. By focusing on the way the body moves through its environment, the film creates raw, honest moments and forces viewers to pay careful attention to Elena and Dovydas’ exchanges, such as their body language, facial expressions, and tone. Otherwise, the audience could miss subtle hints of the character’s feelings. A flicker of sorrow, moment of hope, flash of annoyance. [continue reading…]

Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

New York City, Feb 2 – What do you think of when you hear the words Dissociative Identity Disorder? Is it a term that causes fear? Maybe it’s a phrase you would only think of when watching a film such as Split, where the protagonist with this disorder is set up to be a villain. Our culture has slowly built a monster to be feared when it comes to severe mental illnesses. An individual with Dissociative Identity Disorder, or D.I.D., is almost invisible, serving as fodder for villain tropes in genre movies, as cheap jokes, or as examples of people who have failed society, instead of being individuals that society itself has failed.

This mythos is the complicated reality that Kitoko Mai, one of the most charismatic heroines you might come across this year, has to detangle when she finds herself diagnosed with D.I.D. in the short film Thriving: A Dissociated Reverie.

Written by Kitoko Mai and directed by Nicole Bauzin, Thriving: A Dissociated Reverie is a surrealist journey into Kitoko’s world that takes any preconceived notion of the disorder and twists it in a playful yet insightful manner. After decades of this disorder being inauthentically portrayed, and usually, by white men, Kitoko takes us into their own perspective in a refreshing manner. We walk through Kitoko’s journey to a diagnosis, and how they have learned to embrace every part of them literally and figuratively. [continue reading…]

Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Los Angeles, Feb 1 – I bloom. I flower. I grow. I thrive.

These four short sentences are etched into a notebook near the end of the animated short By Water, which premiered at Sundance 2023 as part of the Animation Short Film Program. The intensely personal experimental short follows an unlikely hero’s journey into his subconscious, where each memory becomes a cathartic vehicle for reconciliation and healing for himself and his sibling.

The story stems from the writer/director Iyabo Kwayana’s relationship with her brother, who has a mental disability and whose whereabouts were unknown for three years. After an unexpected voicemail 3 years after his disappearance, Kwayana made the conscious decision to honor his message and create By Water as a way to complete her brother’s story. [continue reading…]

Salt Lake City, UT, Jan. 30 – As part of Slamdance’s first in-person Unstoppable series, a showcase of films made exclusively by disabled artists, “Teacher of Patience” spotlights the Felter Family and follows them as they travel to educate the public and advocate for people with disabilities. After Tom Felter heard multiple stories about first responders making quick decisions and judgments about people with disabilities that led to unnecessary tragedies, such as the death of Ethan Saylor, he realized that he was in the unique position as both a paramedic and father of Emily, who is a person with Down syndrome, to educate the public. Thus, he developed The Emily Talk with first responders in mind.

In the same vein as the Talk itself, one of the primary goals of this 30-minute documentary is to serve as an educational tool for first responders and preaches the idea of patience when interacting with people with disabilities. Having Emily front and center strengthens not only the educational aspect of the film, but the film itself. Emily is a funny and loving person who also swears like a sailor, and the films shows her complex nature by following her day-to-day life while her family fills in aspects of her story in sit-down interviews. [continue reading…]

Credit: Steve Wilkie/FOX

Washington, D.C., Jan. 26 – Until their child is born, most parents wait in anticipation. They pick out baby names, scour parenting books, and dream about what kind of person their child will become. But what happens when expectation doesn’t meet reality? Marlee Matlin’s directorial debut “Ava’s Story,” the second episode of crime drama Accused, presents a real-life example to that question: the cochlear implant debate.

The episode revolves around Ava (Stephanie Nogueras), Deaf* surrogate to hearing couple Max and Jenny (Aaron Ashmore and Megan Boone). All is well, until they discover their child Lucie is deaf. The couple wants Lucie to use cochlear implants; Ava wants to protect Lucie’s deafness. In a moment of desperation, Ava kidnaps the baby. Some viewers may be quick to judge her impulsivity, but Matlin shows that the cochlear implant debate is nothing but complex, deftly weaving each character’s passion and motives into a more complete picture. [continue reading…]

Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

New York City, Jan 26 – Well Wishes My Love, Your Love is a mesmerizing experience with a carefully crafted animated style that will take you into another world. Gabriel Gabriel Garble’s animated short film premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in the Animation Short Film Program. An accomplished illustrator outside of being an animation director, Garble’s experimental film is breaking the barriers of animation as a whole and how we as an audience can experience a film.

Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss, a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. The companion records the limb being exposed to textures and materials, surprising his friend with the recorded journey. Through experimental 2D and 3D techniques, Garble builds a dreamy and contemplative universe. This silent film can feel all-encompassing through its ambient sound which captures both natural sounds and a hypnotic hymn that pulls the audience into a slow meditation. This means that as we journey through the boy and his friend’s prosthetic arm, we’re thrown directly into Garble’s unique world and travel from the perspective of both the boy and the prosthetic arm. We watch a sunset that feels so abstract yet so real. We pet the silhouette of a three-legged horse, who, through the carefully composed music and animation, truly breathes right next to us. It can be hard to pull away from the screen as we’re pulled into colorful hypnosis. [continue reading…]

A still from Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, by Davis Guggenheim an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Park City, Utah, Jan. 25 – Presented as an interview and told through both archival and scripted elements, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is about owning your narrative, which often is difficult for disabled individuals to do. All too often, society determines the worth of an individual based on preconceived notions. Even when the most successful people acquire a disability, society is quick to judge and make assumptions that they are now less than.

This led Michael J. Fox to hide his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, which he received at 29 years of age (younger than most), for seven years. He would mask trembling by twiddling with an object in his left hand and timed his pills, popping them “like Halloween Smarties” to have the most effect when he was working.

“Therapeutic value, comfort – none of these were the reason I took these pills. There was only one reason: to hide,” Fox says in the documentary. “I became a virtuoso of manipulating drug intake so that I’d peak at exactly the right time and place.” [continue reading…]

Jeena Yi and Anna Sargent in Take Me Home. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Park City, Utah, Jan. 25 – After winning the Julia S Gouw Film Challenge in partnership with Janet Yang Productions and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, the short film Take Me Home had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

The short follows a cognitively disabled adult named Anna who lives with her aging mother in Midland, Florida. When her mother is unresponsive, Anna calls her sister Emily for help. Unable to articulate in a way that Emily truly understands, Anna is brushed aside.

It isn’t until Emily comes home from work that Anna’s concerns are validated. What follows is a seemingly hopeless struggle for Emily to lay out a plan for Anna moving forward. A particular point of contention centers around what Anna’s daily medication is supposed to be. Without their mom, there’s a disconnect between how the two sisters communicate. In the end, it’s Anna whose straightforward strength and ability to see the bigger picture that fosters a reconciliation between them, culminating in Anna expressing her desire to be independent and get her own place to live. [continue reading…]