photo from Citizenshift website
Six films were made by This Ability Media Club, a group of adults with developmental disabilities who have learned to use video to tell their stories.
Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice,
Contributor Features
"While becoming a director, marginalized individuals learn to actively express themselves in the process of creating new media works, regardless of the commercial potential of the work. In the process of training a novice director, the artist, researcher, or artist-researcher makes the connection between self-expression and self-determination explicit, allowing the novice to apply artistic knowledge to their social relationships."
Lorna R. Boschman
Lorna R. Boschman has been a documentary and media artist for over twenty years; her work has shown at many festivals and venues, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two of her works are part of the collection at The National Gallery of Canada. Currently Boschman is a PhD student and sessional instructor at Simon Fraser University, School of Interactive Arts and Technology. She was the director of the community-led media arts training workshop for self-advocates and their supporters called, this ability media club.
This Ability is an innovative filmmaking project that puts the tools of media creation directly into the hands of adults with developmental disabilities. Formed as a partnership between the National Film Board of Canada and the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion (BACI), with support from Philia and the United Way, the aim was to move away from videos that merely observe people with disabilities, towards ones that give an inside perspective on the human experience of disability.
Through regular workshops and hands-on training, the filmmakers in the This Ability Media Club developed the skills to tell their own stories in their own way. Filmmaker Lorna Boschman worked over the course of a year with a dedicated group of six to eight people, meeting weekly, building a relationship and helping them become comfortable with the cameras and other technical gear they would need to make their own films.
From the National Film Board of Canada website
see film directed by Michelle McDonald, "Be Kind to Spiders"
Project Director, Lorna Boschman
This Ability Media Club/National Film Board of Canada/Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion
Watch here:
http://citizenshift.org/be-kind-spiders
