What if I told you there was a film at Slamdance right now that followed a traditional structure of showing kids congregating at a competition, as if they were in a Spelling Bee, or the teens featured in the Apple documentaries Boys State and Girls State. even though that film may hold a common thread, making you feel like you’ve seen it before in something like Spellbound, the aforementioned Spelling Bee documentary. This new one has a different kind of competition, and different competitors. In play here are blind kids, and they are here to prove their proficiency at Braille, typing fast and furiously to win the top prize. Then came the production team, who introduced them to cameras, encouraging three of the kids to film their own experiences.

What is so unique here is that the kids are handed a camera with no real specific parameters, so the whole thing is representative of what blind youth might choose to shoot or focus on, without necessarily thinking about traditional framing or structure. It’s a little like giving them a canvas and some paint, and asking them to create art. obviously, their work, their creations are going to be different, as their perspective is wildly different from what is usually in the directors chair. but, it is all very welcome, as the movie challenges its audience to accept that there is a radically different approach. Sure, if these kids got into film, they’d likely learn more and more about framing, composition, cinematography, and editing. There are blind professionals working in Hollywood, and not everything they produce feels like an experiment. However, these aren’t kids necessarily driven to think about filmmaking, as the medium feels often exclusionary, and therefore their future is in being able to work a braille keyboard as fast as possible. The cameras are just here to highlight three of the contestants and their experiences.

I wasn’t born blind, so I can’t say this is a shared experience for me, but my bias is very much in favor of any disability centric documentary. Whether it be Deaf President Now or Patrice The movie, I often gravitate toward stories that elevate our marginalized disabled voices just a bit stronger. The typical field is full of people pretending, like Kate Hudson’s Oscar nominated turn in Song Song Blue, that it is nice to see real representation.

In admitting my bias, I’ll say I screened this over a month ago, and was asked directly my thoughts, as well as to participate in a summit on the best ways this film could reach blind youth and inspire them to pick up a camera. I’m all for the tomorrow there’ll be more of us approach, so I participated. My bias ends there, as I wasn’t involved in the making of the film, nor do I have any credit or payment or anything like that. it’s a disability doc, and i was asked to use my knowledge and platform to advance the film.

Still, even a month later, i remember one of my initial thoughts was that I wanted to be introduced to the kids in a more traditional structure. I’m thinking, rather than the entire movie being go pro format, being able to see from outside their body, their expressions as they first get that camera is rewarding. For blind audiences, we’d get the audio description, which this film dos have, but still, there’s a reason everyone takes to YouTube to unbox things. we inherently love watching people unbox and explore for the first time.Being able to see the process these kids go through before ever hitting record, might still be rewarding and not a fools errand.

And the audio description, for something made essentially in house,is pretty fantastic. Instead of outsourcing to Deluxe, DVW, ThreePlay, or another company, they just happen to have the knowledge of how to write AD for their own film. I can only hope a major distributor picks it up and gives it a chance at a theatrical release, sending it to cities across the country for people to have their hearts and minds opened up

Brailled it is nothing if not interesting, taking a somewhat familiar model and presenting it in a fresh new way. That uniqueness is what should excite cinephiles, and that conversation sparked hopefully will inspire others to pick up a camera when they otherwise believed they could not. Brailled It is a bold, daring, original work, which is guaranteed to appeal to its niche target audience, and almost unapologetically unafraid of how it is perceived outside of it. The word audacity comes to mind, as it often does when someone in our community has the audacity to do something non-traditional, or occupy a space previously denied. If art is universal, and people believe we make arts for arts sake, then the logical conclusion is that there must be a space and venue for these kinds of voices, and there also must be an audience willing and excited to embrace what they have to offer.

I hope Brailled it resonates broadly, but more importantly, I hope it speaks to that little kid who hadn’t given a thought to filmmaking before, because I’d love to see what they come up with if they make this their world. Brailled it is both a celebration of traditional values, by highlighting a braille competition, but also subversive in asking those same kids to participate in something very few like them have ever been able to do. In my book, that’s what makes this brilliant.

Fresh: 9.7/10