Filmmaker Larry Bissonnette during Q&A for screening of Wretches & Jabberers at the 2011 ReelAbilities New York Film Festival.
The ReelAbilities Film Festival makes its Boston debut tomorrow. Thanks to The Boston Jewish Film Festival and a host of other sponsors, film buffs in the Boston area have a chance to see six films over the next week that tell powerful stories, both narrative and documentary, about the worlds people with disabilities inhabit. Correspondent Loren King publishes the full schedule in The Boston Globe.
Now in its fourth year, the ReelAbilities Film Festival has expanded to a dozen different U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In New York, where the festival began, 20 different venues will host screenings for the 2012 program, with submissions from France, Israel, Iran, and Finland.
ReelAbilitiesBoston will include a showing of Shooting Beauty at 12:00 noon on Sunday, February 5, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The 2009 documentary was shot in Watertown, Massachusetts, just 40 minutes south of ATI headquarters, and has won scads of awards at film festivals across the U.S. and accolades from the press.
Shooting Beauty starts with photographer Courtney Bent teaching photography to a group of people with disabilities; she even adapts some of the cameras functionality so they can used by her students. Along with her boyfriend (now husband), filmmaker George Kachadorian, Courtney tracks her students’ progress toward self-expression, even when they struggle to communicate in their everyday lives, over the course of 10 years.
In an interview with Darren Garnick, the New England Film Junkie blogger for the Boston Herald, at the time of its release, she says this about the film’s evolution over that time span:
Five years ago, it would have been a film about ‘the struggles that people with disabilities have to overcome.’ Ten years later, the film is less about what ‘people with disabilities’ have to overcome and more a film about struggles ‘people’ have to overcome. The disability part is secondary.
Bent and Kachadorian have used the success of Shooting Beauty to launch a series of programs geared toward engagement and inclusivity for people with disabilities in communities. They have tailored the programs to be age-specific, starting with a middle school and high school curriculum, and moving into a college and university setting. They even offer a corporate diversity and disability awareness workshop for businesses that employ people with disabilities and want to facilitate a culture of awareness and acceptance.
Take a look at the Shooting Beauty trailer, and then clear your schedule to see that movie and some of the other fine ReelAbilitiesBoston films taking place this week.
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Image by Edu-Tourist (Michael L. Dorn), used under its Creative Commons license.