During Disability Awareness Month, the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities hosted their annual presentation of the Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival at Alamo Drafthouse Village.

Story by Aize Igori

During Disability Awareness Month, the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities hosted their annual presentation of the Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival at Alamo Drafthouse Village.

William Greer, founder and director of the Cinema Touching Disability film festival, created the event as both a fundraising opportunity for the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities and a way to raise public awareness about disability. “We show movies with a good and positive representation of disability,” Greer says.

Festival veteran Danney Ursery agrees. “When most people think of the disabled, they think of someone housed in an institution or on a street corner. You don’t see them as people. You see their disabilities and you don’t see the person. With the films, hopefully they can have a broader view of what it means to be human. There’s no one way of being human,” he says.

Greer also maintains that while the festival engages a new audience every year, there’s also some special factors that keep people coming back year after year. “It’s not only good films that are interesting, but we have extra things going along with the films. Like we had a discussion of people who are amputees and who created artificial limbs at the end of this evening,” he says.

Along with the feature film, the festival also included a pre-show that featured live music by Sean Wallace and Tristan Archer, local musicians with disabilities, and an exhibit by e-Nable UT, a student organization at the University of Texas at Austin that prints 3-D prosthetic hands.

Glori Das, president of e-Nable UT, says she started the UT chapter as an opportunity for engineering students to use hands-on engineering skills to give back to the community in tangible ways.

After the pre-show, the second night kicked off with showings of several short films in the festival’s short film documentary competition, with the winner being “My Dad Matthew”, a film that gave insight into the life of a disability activist with cerebral palsy and his relationship with his son. Between films, there were readings of several entries from the Pen 2 Paper creative writing contest.

The main feature for the night was a screening of the film “Out on a Limb”, a documentary that blends several people’s experiences with prosthetics and provides some insight into the future of artificial limbs.

After the film, local athlete Greg LaKomski and Das united for a panel on prosthetics today and the future of prosthetics.

LaKomski opened up about being an athlete with a disability. “I have to say that, from the standpoint of a cyclist, I’ve always raced with able-bodied people. So we strive to not have to modify a bicycle. In all hopes for myself and other amputees we’ve worked with, our goal was to use the same interface.”

He also was quick to dispel the myth that his prosthetics might give him an advantage when it comes to competition. “I have to tell you that having a prosthetic does not give you an advantage in any sort of activity whatsoever,” he says. “But that’s not to say in the future, like how we’ve seen in some of the movies with exoskeletons, that there could come a time where a prosthetic could amplify strength and power, but we are nowhere near that.”

On the current limitations of the prosthetics currently produced by e-Nable, “Most amputees are of the lower limb and e-Nable doesn’t have a 3-D printed toe or leg prosthetic because putting the weight on plastic is difficult,” Das says. “As far as the future of prosthetics goes, for starters, the fingers can just move up and down, you don’t get individual finger motion and there’s also no individual wrist motion yet, so research is being done by other e-Nable chapters in this area [of research].”

Greer is grateful that the festival has received continued support since 2004. “We show these films and hold this festival to raise money for Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, an organization that supports the rights of all Texans with disabilities.”