Documentary


Directors’ Vision

We made this film to be a non-medical look at life with traumatic brain injury (TBI). It explores the role art plays in many people’s lives for connecting communities, bringing peace and peace of mind, engaging in work, and exploring life. It was important for us to make a film from within the community, and Co-Director Cheryl Green identifies as a peer with TBI. The film deliberately has no imagery of car wrecks, hospital stays, or rehabilitation. There are no interviews with doctors, providers, or family members. Rather, we focus on peers with TBI for the storytelling, and we witness them interacting with their families and communities, through challenges and triumphs. The film contains very difficult topics like talk of suicide, homophobia, housing instability, and isolation. It was important for us to not avoid these very real parts of the disabled experience.

Here are downloadable transcripts of the film, including the feature-length documentary and the three short films that were made from the feature.

Full Film Transcript, Brandon’s StoryTranscript, Dani’s Story Transcript, and Kris’s Story Transcript

Disability Arts

Disability arts are a global movement. Yet it is difficult to find art by people with brain injury within the disability art world, as disability and brain injury communities have been culturally very separate. Some people with brain injury are integrated into cross-disability projects; most only get to participate in arts programming through rehabilitation or art therapy. Uniting the groups through arts can support increased self- and group-advocacy and pride. This film contributes to the activism being done through the arts in disability culture by looking at artworks as cultural artifacts and not only as part of therapy and rehabilitation. As with storytelling in other disability communities, here people with brain injuries  have the opportunity to tell their own stories and be witnessed as people, not patients. No matter how mild or severe the brain injury or its consequences, people with brain injuries are people. Artists with brain injury are artists.

Media Representation of peers with brain injury

Most media representation of people with brain injuries happens in big-budget films with non-disabled actors portraying characters with brain injury or news features and items where the primary storytellers are doctors and researchers. There is also quite a bit of press about artists with brain injuries that looks mostly at the therapeutic value of art or at the artist’s injured brain as a mysterious object to explore. Although these news pieces emphasize the creative abilities of the artist, graphic descriptions of their injuries are included as a way to introduce the artist. By doing this, audiences can feel a catharsis after seeing an awful wreck or injury and getting a sense of how well the person eventually recovered from their personal horror. But our lives are much more than sensational injuries, miraculous recoveries, and stories to inspire awe. We are part of communities. What we feel should be shown more often are the ways society responds to disability and pain and how artists with brain injuries speak their truths about these often negative responses.

Valuing–not fixing–members of the disability community

We believe it’s possible and reasonable to expect that disabled people can be valued as much as non-disabled people and that people with brain injury have the capacity to define their own lives and identities in their own terms. This film presents a well-rounded picture of people who struggle, fear, triumph, explore, and engage. They are people with agency, drive, talent, and the right to make decisions. Along these lines, we also feel it’s possible and reasonable that people from any marginalized identity be given the space to discuss and question their circumstances and to share their narratives publicly. Much of the brain injury media landscape is dominated by white people (such as myself–Cheryl) and by cisgender men. The public believes that the most interesting stories are ones where either someone has it all and loses it all, or someone miraculously returns to a fulfilling life after doctors say they will likely not even live through the night after a severe injury. Though compelling, those are not most people’s stories. And everyone, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, disability status, severity of injury, class, and other identity markers, deserves the space to share their story.

The blog

It turns out we can’t interview everyone we want! If we did, we would be filming for the rest of our lives and still have no movie.

The blog exists to share art and start conversations. Guest Bloggers with disabilities give us a peek into their experiences and perspectives through blogging. We also have reviews of books and documentaries about brain injury and disability as well as discussions of how the media represents disability experiences. All posts are written by Cheryl unless otherwise noted. If you like something you see on the blog, hit one of the social media sharing buttons below each post! Write some comments to get the conversation going!

The focus is not so much on sharing stories of how someone got their brain injury. The focus really is on art, how you view brain injury or disability, how society views brain injury or disability, and what we can do as a community to increase understanding, acceptance, and equity for folks with all disabilities from the many intersecting communities we are in.

Using this community arts blog

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