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Thankfully, none of you readers or listeners has ever complained that technically, Who Am I To Stop It has never actually premiered out in the world. We’ve screened on college campuses and in community groups across the US, in Canada, and in the UK. But other than a couple of super-secret, Kickstarter donor-only private screenings in 2016, people haven’t had the chance to watch this film in a proper movie theater. We are so happy to change that!
Who Am I To Stop It is screening at Whitsell Auditorium through Portland Art Museum’s Object Stories program. The current Object Stories exhibition is called “Invisible Me,” and it focuses on five Portland-area storytellers with different types of invisible disabilities. You can find the Invisible Me Closed Captioned videos on YouTube if you can’t get to the museum to watch, listen, and read them there. If you can get to the museum, what’s extra there is objects that each storyteller chose on display with a little background on the storytellers and their objects. You know, Object Stories. The other extra piece is the interactive part. There’s post-it notes where visitors can share a tiny piece of their disability experiences and post them on the wall. Last time I checked a week ago, over 4,000 post-its had been added by patrons. And people had taken over 6,000 pins with different statements around invisible disability.
Any Portlanders reading this who wanna join me some time to view this exhibit, drop me a line. I have a guest pass to share!
I think it’s so beautiful that a big, long-standing institution that wasn’t founded on principles of disability inclusion or of disability justice has such a desire to highlight these topics and to make the exhibit quite accessible. And being part of the program, I appreciate that my disabled-made film about disability experiences is being honored. One of the difficulties of doing activism and advocacy around invisible disabilities is that there are so very, very, very many people doing it all the time, and it rarely gets recognized outside of disability community with genuine attention and appreciation. The Body Is Not An Apology, Invisible Disability Project, Everyday Feminism, and Sins Invalid are just a very tiny, few groups that have been doing work in this arena for some time, much of it wonderfully intersectional. This is hardly the tip of the iceberg!
Screening details from the flyer:
April 29th, 12:30 pm at the Whitsell Auditorium
(1219 SW Park Ave.)
Event is FREE, but seating is limited.
Reserve tickets at pam.to/Who-Am-I-tickets
This is a scent-free event, and the film has Open Captions and Audio Description for all.
Click here for a downloadable, accessible flyer you can share.
See ya there!