Lost in the recent discussions about employment rates, workplace accessibility, and assistive technology was Rich Juzwiak’s thoughtful essay, “13 Hours, 42 Movies About People With Developmental Disabilities: Enduring Sprout,” published on, of all places, Gawker.
The “Sprout” Juzwiak’s article title refers to was the 10th Annual Sprout Film Festival, which took place at New York City’s illustrious Metropolitan Museum of Art during the last weekend in April; and “endured” is probably an adjective that Sprout’s founder, Anthony Di Salvo, would embrace. He tells Juzwiak that the selection committee favors realism over positive when reviewing films which to screen.
Accuracy is of paramount importance in Sprout’s attempt to provide programming intended to “empower” people with disabilities and “rejuvenate” the families and professionals who live and work with this population, while still getting outsiders “to see the potential and look at people with developmental disabilities in a different light.”
But as Di Salvo also notes, sometimes just getting people to see individuals with disabilities at all is a challenge. Sprout’s tagline is “Making the Invisible Visible,” and the festival’s website has a Sproutflix.org offshoot site that makes many of these films available to the public. One of the article’s commentators notes that none of the films shown at the festival are available at the online video vendor, Netflix, and Juzwiak is likewise “infuriated” at his own realization that the lives of people with disabilities do not have a voice in the pop culture landscape:
The reality TV craze may have dropped a few degrees from its fever pitch of yesteryear, but we remain as a culture fascinated by our own humanity and its extremes… In all of our recent discussions of representation and implicit bigotry regarding Girls, for example, has anyone even made a passing observation about the lack of people with disabilities in culture? I haven’t seen any. I don’t think that’s out of hatred, just raw ignorance: people don’t even think to think about people with disabilities.
After watching dozens of films, Juzwiak is to be forgiven for falling back on the movie critic’s “I laughed, I cried” cliche in his descriptions of the actual films. What’s important is that this individual who has lived his life largely outside the realm of people with disabilities was emotionally and intellectually stimulated by the experience, and ultimately came away with a sense of hopefulness. He writes:
… [T]he dialogue at Sprout was so impassioned and engaged and just plain correct that it feels like some kind of burgeoning -– with cultural sensitivity seeming to increase by the day, it’s inconceivable that this kind of fairness won’t break through… Sprout is the avant garde of tolerance discourse. This radical thinking requires no stretch of imagination, just a little heart.
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Image by Julie Jordan Scott, used under its Creative Commons license.