'Shooting Beauty'

posted by Jett Loe

(Jett and Gareth are at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, North Carolina.  For the next few days these posts are their first impressions of films screened there)

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Click below to hear our interview with ‘Shooting Beauty’ producer and project director Courtney Bent:

The Film Talk – Part 58 – Full Frame Documentary Festival – Day 3

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Shooting Beauty / Directed by George Kachadorian

I cried.  Throughout.  This movie.

It’s not groundbreaking.  It doesn’t dazzle with technique or polish.  Instead it touches you simply with that most profound of messages – The Other is You.  The disabled person.  Is.  A human being too.

‘Shooting Beauty’ tells what happened when professional fashion photographer Courtney Bent gave cameras to people with cerebral palsy – well, so what?  Well…look at the photo below, taken by Tony Knight, one of the disabled folks Courtney furnished with a cam:

Boom!

It’s a good photo – for a lot of reasons – but mainly for its transportive power.  We are the photographer.  We are sitting there.  Trapped.  Trapped in some machine and this is how people look at us.  How they perceive us.  How they think of us – if they have to think of us at all.

In addition to this film’s polemical power there are also moving stories here about struggle, love, endurance and all the other things that all us humans have to go through – that’s why I cried:

It’s tough being a human being but ‘Shooting Beauty’ makes you glad to be alive – if you’re a teacher of teens I implore you to show this film to your students – it’ll spark a lively discussion and sensitise them to the humanity of those around them.  What more could we ask from a film?

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(Photo at top taken by Jett of Courtney Bent at the Full Frame Festival)

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 10:04 am. It is filed under Blog, Documentaries, Film Festivals, Jett Loe, Jett Loe Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.