Disability Pride Movie Night

Crip Camp

Join us for a special viewing of Crip Camp, a story of one group of people and captures one moment in time.

DIRECTORS' NOTE FROM JIM LEBRECHT AND NICOLE NEWNHAM

Crip Camp is about the emotional experience of finding community and yourself for the first time and the power of realizing that a better life is possible through social change.

Camp Jened, a ramshackle hippie-run summer camp "for the handicapped," (a term no longer used) was an environment where people with disabilities were treated as equal members of a community, empowered to make their own decisions, and experienced for the first time the fullness of themselves as human beings.

At the camp, late night discussions in the bunk led to revelations of common experiences of oppression. These experiences caused a perspective shift in Jim, and in many of the campers and counselors, that was profoundly liberating. It awakened an understanding that the problem was not them, the problem was an unjust world. This realization would go on to have ripple effects that would change the trajectory of the campers' lives, the lives of other people with disabilities, people without disabilities, the United States, and eventually the worla.

Making Crip Camp has been a unique collaboration: between a man and a woman, disabled and non-disabled, a first-time director and a veteran filmmaker. Our respective perspectives pushed on each other and produced a fuller human narrative. We made Crip Camp through partnership and built our own community in the making of this film.

As you host a screening, we ask you to pay heed to this central theme in the film - the importance of lifting voices that don't often get heard and building community. Seek out the stories from your community that haven't been told. In your discussions, make extra space for the voices of activists and advocates who are currently working to drive change. Finally, we urge all of you to take action to amplify the voices of people with disabilities, particularly those from intersectionally marginalized communities, and practice the concepts of inclusion and accessibility into your daily lives.

Our hope is that your discussions will spark new thoughts, new behaviors, new actions - and that truly special sense of community that binas us together and lifts us up as one.

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