ReelAbilities Returns to Lehman
By Leonel Henriquez
Kitty Lunn, star of “Dancing on Wheels,” shares her experience with the audience. Photo by Leonel Henriquez.
On March 6 and 7, the ninth annual ReelAbilities Film Festival: New York returned to Lehman for the fifth year running. The festival showcased ten films from all over the world---features, narrative shorts, and documentaries---on the lives of individuals with a wide range of disabilities and their families as they cope with their day- to-day lives. Some were born with disabilities such as Autism or Down syndrome, while others acquired them later in life through traumatic experience, illness or disease. “By bringing these films to the campus we’re really trying to raise awareness,” said Merrill Parra, the Director of Student Disabilities Services at Lehman. “The bottom line is that disability is only one characteristic of what a person is all about.” The festival aims not only to educate people about the lives of the disabled, but also to show the commonality of the human condition shared by everyone, and that each person has a struggle to overcome in life.
For James Roll, a 2009 Lehman grad with an M.A. in recreation attending for the fourth time, the best part of the festival is, “trying to get some of the other students who don’t have disabilities or people in their lives with disabilities to come in to watch and see how much like everybody else they really are. They’re really just like anybody else.”
This year was the first time Doreen Mendez, a 50-year-old who survived a stroke five years ago, attended the festival. Now suffering from aphasia, a form of language impairment, Mendez came because, “I am interested in advocacy for disabled people after this happened to me. That’s why I wanted to see other people that are going through the same thing and what else they need that I have not seen yet.”
One festival highlight was an appearance by Kitty Lunn, the subject of the film directed by Qingzi Fan, “Dancing on Wheels.” Lunn, 66, is a dancer who was paralyzed from the waist down after falling on ice in front of her building in Manhattan in 1990. She spent three years in the hospital and underwent five spinal surgeries.
“Being a dancer was my identity,” she told the audience.“It’s one thing when a dancer decides they want to stop dancing and do something else but that’s their choice. I felt like my identity had been stripped away from me and I didn’t really know who I was.” The film chronicles her life as a wheelchair dancer, teacher and choreographer and is an inspirational testimony to her struggle to identify as a disabled dancer.“ I was terrified,” she recalled.“ I had been dancing since I was eight years old, but I had to find a way.”
