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Hi, I'm Fran Prezant at Abilities! in Albertson,
Long Island.
And we're here to talk to you today about ReelAbilities,
the third annual New York Disabilities Film Festival.
With us in the studio today we have Anita Altman,
who is the Deputy Managing Director for the Department
of Government Relations and External Affairs at
UJA Federation New York.
FRAN: Well, thank you for joining us today Anita again and
this is the third year of the festival.
Can you talk a little bit about its origin, the goals
and how you came to collaborate with the JCC in
Manhattan on this?
Sure; over the last fifteen years or so I had been deeply
involved in development of services for people with
disabilities working with our vast network of agencies UJ
Federation in New York has over a hundred agencies.
Fortunately with the collaboration of an incredibly
generous foundation the J.E and Z.B Butler Foundation we
have in partnership helped to build entrance for the
UJA Federation Network of Agencies in terms of services
for people with disabilities.
Several years ago actually before coming up we convened a
conference on inclusion it was called "Opening the gates of
Community" and it was a watershed conference for our
community because it really targeted the leadership, our
rabbinic leadership, our board and executive directors of
agencies to really challenge the communal institutions to
recognize our responsibility to really literally open the
gates and to welcome and support and embrace people
with disabilities and to recognize that community is a
very broad needs to be a broader definition than has
traditionally been acknowledged.
During the same time I was involved with a film maker who
is making remarkable film called "Praying with Lior"
which really raised my consciousness about the impact
that film can make on people's consciousness and as I come to
describe it opening the hearts and minds, and it became clear
to me that one of the ways that we could help foster the
whole conversation about inclusion was through film.
One summer night I was introduced to a young man
Isaac Zablocki who is the director of the film program
at the JCC in Manhattan, Manhattan's Upper West Side.
In my opening conversation with Yitsy, I said I have a
dream and my dream is to have the New York Disabilities Film
Festival and Yitsy's immediate response was that's about the
most important thing I could do.
Now I said OK so where are you going to do it?
And he literally, thirteen months later we had the first
annual Reel Abilities New York Disabilities Film Festival.
From the beginning we chose to make this a New York Community
Film Festival, not a Jewish Community and I say that
because we recognize that what we were aiming to do was
really to help to transform cultural attitudes and that we
needed to engage the whole community of New York.
Clearly you know, coming out of the Jewish Community you
know, I feel a particular mission within my own
community but this is a much larger issue and the challenge
is for all of us.
Hence, you know, the structure of the festival is really to
reach out and build partnerships all across not
only the geographic region of the New York Metropolitan area
but also across disabilities, across communities and now
that we're in our third year, I feel that we have ways to go
because it's a constantly evolving process but that in
fact we are achieving that goal.
FRAN: So you mentioned transforming cultural attitudes
inherent in that is increasing awareness
about the lives of the people with disabilities.
Absolutely.
FRAN: An empowering people with disabilities to be
part of society.
Absolutely, you know we...one of the things I think we
recognized in our work is how marginalized people with
disabilities and their families feel.
They really feel cut off and neglected, ignored and
abandoned some I can't speak for everybody.
But that certainly is the feedback that we've gotten a
lot of...and very disempowered.
The hope and the vision that imbues the ethos of this
festival is really to show our common humanity.
Our films are not tear jerker's to evoke pity they're
not about the heroic individual who's overcoming
all obstacles, they're about real people.
What you, I think and certainly the feedback that
we've gotten from the audience who've seen the films is how
transformational it is.
You know, we see our common humanity in the other and the
other may not be all that different, they have different
issues in their lives but frankly we all have issues in
our lives.
So that is one of the critical components I think in the aims
of this festival.
FRAN: So clearly this has been successful, it's in its third
year, can you talk a little bit about some of the feedback
and then what are some of the changes you've seen over the
past three years?
Well last year we instituted audience surveys and we were
really gratified by the high level of response people
really love the films; they talked about how much they
have learned from just sitting in a dark theater.
Now remember that each of our screenings also incorporates,
and this is critical to the program, a talk back.
So it's not just sitting in a dark theater and watching a
film, the lights go up at the end of the film and there is a
conversation that takes place.
What we aim to do as much as we can and what we can afford,
because this is running on a relatively shoe string budget
is to try and bring the filmmakers, in some instances
the stars of our films to be involved in a conversation and
if we're not able to do that, to craft programs to bring
people who are experts in the particular you know issues
that are being screened to participate with the audience.
As I say the feedback was wonderful and the demographic
was also so interesting last year because we had more than
doubling in the number of people who saw the films there
were over the course of the festival over 4,000 people who
participated and it was a relatively young demographic
and it was a very mixed demographic.
There were certainly people with disabilities who
participated but more than a majority were not.
In terms of the change we have a really growing, I mean I
feel as if we struck a resonant chord this year we've
expanded our partners we have for the first time the New
York Public Library as a partner with us and there are
going to be screenings and programs in a number of branch
libraries in the Bronx and Manhattan.
We have two museums that have signed on the Guggenhiem and
the Whitney, CUNY has more formally embraced us and I'm
expecting actually in year four, next year, that we will
have even more CUNY Campus' participating and at this
point we have twenty different locations they run from...they
are in every single county of our metropolitan area,
Westchester, the five boroughs of New York City and Nassau
and Suffolk County each will have screenings and what we've
tried to do is make the screenings as accessible as
possible to...and bring them into the communities where
people live.