IU Cinema honors Disability Awareness Month with film series

A person with a stutter is not a serial killer.

Hollywood has perpetuated a myth that disabilities are bad by depicting disabled individuals as James Bond villains or worse.

In the movies, the disability is visible: It defines the characters and shoves them into the background.

But as part of Disability Awareness Month, the Office of Disability Services for Students at IU is bringing disabilities to the forefront with a series of films that positively portray disabilities as a part of everyday life.

“A night out at the movies is a popular American pastime and is a way to immerse yourself in another identity,” said Tanner Terrell, a graduate assistant with the disability services department. “With the IU Cinema partnership, we were presented with the possibility to immerse someone in the identity of a person with a disability.”

Through these films and Disability Awareness Month’s theme of “Celebrating a World of Difference,” the department hopes to instill a sense of diversity and optimism.

“People might automatically assume the negative aspects of having a disability, but we’re interested in portraying a positive and empowering sort of perspective,” Terrell said. “That’s what’s not out there.”

Following a March 6 screening of “The King’s Speech,” the IU Cinema will offer screenings of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”  at 7 p.m. today and “Lars and the Real Girl”  at 9:30 p.m. March 29.

1993’s “Gilbert Grape” tells the story of a teenager (Johnny Depp) who lives with his morbidly obese mother (Darlene Cates) and a younger brother with autism (Leonardo DiCaprio).

As one disability is visible and the other is not, Disability Services Director Martha Engstrom said it’s important to understand the difference in the ways we react to them.
“Disability is a broad group, and it isn’t just about someone in a wheelchair,” Engstrom said.

IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers even noted how disabilities go beyond the medical aspect in the first film of the series, “The King’s Speech.”

“Disabilities are everywhere. Disabilities are non-discriminating to where you can have people of all races and social climates in the same boat,” Vickers said. “There are no boundaries. Even a king can have the same problem as someone on the lowest economic scale and can share those issues in their daily lives.”

But the goal of Disability Awareness Month as a whole, which also includes student panels and a talk by comedian Erik Stolhanske on March 27, is to alter the negative perception disabilities carry with them.

Engstrom stressed the need to correct the two operating clichés that disabled people must either be coddled with praise or assistance.

“Both of them are kind of obnoxious to someone who is just living and moving on with life,” Engstrom said.

This is no easy task because even the word disabled implies the negative connotation of “not abled.” There is no neutral word to express a prescribed disability.

“We need to take away the idea that disability is an ailment and needs to be fixed,” Terrell said. “There’s the thought that there’s the ideal human, the norm, and everyone else that’s trying to strive for that, and that’s not accurate. We want people to think about disability differently.”