The Oska Bright Film Festival – now accredited by BAFTA – was bigger than ever this year. Lisa Wolfe saw how identity was central to learning disability film this year around the world
There is a perplexing, baffling, endless interior to everyone in their mind/mental state, which is almost incomparable to your physical health and what you present on your exterior which can be a superficial and fake represen
tation of yourself.”
The themes of Eleana Re’s keynote speech at the 9th edition of Carousel’s Oska Bright Film Festival resonated throughout the four days of this extraordinary event. Re is a visual artist and film-maker who has atypical autism.
Her questioning of identity, how we present ourselves in our daily lives and how we are perceived, was common to many of the films shown over the four-day event in Brighton. It’s an issue everyone can relate to – the pressure to fit in is huge.
The festival opened with It Me, which explores how learning-disabled people navigate the world today. It included Tamsin Parker’s funny and heartfelt Force of Habit, in which she identifies with the Mexican bandit from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, an outsider who struggles to understand his motives as she does hers. Mixing animation with narration, it is an effective call for greater awareness and kicking down barriers.
Shakespeare in Tokyo by Australia’s Bus Stop films is a beautifully shot story of a Shakespeare fan with Down syndrome exploring the culture of Japan and the effect he has on the lives of strangers he meets. His confidence and contentment are at odds with his brother’s urge to shield him from public encounters. The positive messaging was popular with the audience and the central performance captivating enough to overpower the unnecessarily sentimental piano music in certain scenes.
In 2017, Matthew Hellett, head programmer of the festival, introduced the Queer Freedom strand to explore the intersection of queerness and disability.
Six films were shown in this category including Born to Dance With an Extra Chromosome, a documentary about Drag Syndrome, a performance group that is transforming the drag scene world wide. Each artist has a fully defined drag character and totally owns their performance.
It was thrilling to watch how they connected with audiences. In the aftershow panel discussion, we heard the shocking story of how they were banned in some American cities for not confirming to accepted ways of being for learning disabled people. If the revolution is coming, Drag Syndrome might well be leading it.
Meeting across the world
New to the festival this year was a networking breakfast for film-makers from abroad. Oska Bright’s international reach is huge, with films screened from 17 countries in total, including Croatia, Iran, Japan and Russia.
The breakfast brought visitors together, including Germany’s Barner 16 with whom Carousel and Oska Bright have a long relationship. Kai Boysen of Barner made a plea that “whatever happens between the UK and Europe, we need to keep on building a global community for learning disabled artists”.
The dance and music screenings, which showcased a broad range of talent, included Daniel Wakeford’s music video It’s a Wonderful City, filmed in Brighton and sung with infectious passion by the popular TV star.
Kill Off, by Genevieve Clay-Smith, features a bravura performance by Jamie Brewer as young dancer Sonja, who is crazy about krump, a street dance style. As with Shakespeare in Tokyo, an overprotective older sibling learns to let go of fear. Street smart and self-aware, Sonja is a role model for us all.
Your Rocky Spine is the latest in a series of haunting dance films by Shropshire’s Arty Party. Three couples dance across the landscape in finely choreographed duets, with close-ups of hands and bodies that echo the rocky terrain. It culminates in a courtly waltz scene in a country hotel, Downton Abbey style, with not a step out of place. As Arty Party said in the post-show panel discussion: “We did it so many times to get it right. That’s why you enjoyed it.”
Perhaps the most intimate and revealing screening was Portrait of the Artist. Here, fiction gave way to personal experience as visual artists explained their practice in nine illuminating short films.
Most powerful to me was Mary by Erica Sutherland, in which Mary Decesar told of her early years in the US school system, being put to work in a military base and how art has sustained her through hard times.
Her drawing and embroidery are expressions of things she loves and of her world view. “I started to get proud of myself by making things,” she said. “I always liked that, being an artist.”
Studio creativity
Two films focused on studios where learning disabled artists are encouraged to be creative in whatever medium appeals to them.
Tanya Rabbe Webber, a prolific painter herself, runs ArtStudio01 in Shrewsbury and mentors newcomers and experienced artists. In Spain, La Casa de Carlota employs learning disabled artists to work on high-profile commissions for international brands. The film Design Ability takes us through the process from pitch to finished campaign.
The art, such as that by Rose Wylie or Hanna Hoch, is astonishing but it is how the design company applies it that makes the campaign a success. As with many of the more accomplished films in the festival, high production values and skilled editing make a big contribution to its impact.
An example of this is the excellent Oddlands, by Australia’s Bruce Gladwin, winner of the Audience Choice Award. Every frame is masterful, the sound balance is perfect and the interior scenes beautifully lit. This story of a future toxic world is compelling, scary and acted with aplomb. It deserves to be properly distributed as an example of great film-making that just happens to have a cast of mainly learning disabled actors.
It is fantastic that films of this calibre are being made. Production firms, talent pools and audiences are realising the value of difference. At last!
For me though, the films made in bedrooms on low budgets have an aesthetic that is honest and, occasionally, more radical. The work of Danny Smith, winner of this year’s Dance Film Award for Time to Leave and animator Teagan Nash’s The Snowball Effect are good examples.
Triumphant
As the Oska Bright Film Festival shows, there is space for everyone and everyone’s invited. From sessions for children and schools to a late-night screening of experimental film, surgeries with industry experts, a European screening and a triumphant awards party, Oska Bright’s 99 films showed how rich and eclectic the learning disability film scene is worldwide.
Think “talent added” and, as Re says: “You’re enriching people’s lives with your art as well as your own life. Just believe in yourself and go for it.”
- The next Oska Bright Film Festival is in 2021. To submit a film, go to www. oskabright.org, where you can find out about 2019’s winners. A round-up video of this year’s event is at http://tinyurl.com/ yynsgvb7
- The Oska Bright Film Festival is produced by Carousel, a learning disability-led arts company based in Brighton. It is funded by the BFI and Arts Council England
Lisa Wolfe is marketing manager at Carousel
