Thursday, September 1, 2005, 6pm | Kerry Richardson, Mike Ervin, Salome Chasnoff & The Empowered Fe Fes in person!
- Kerry Richardson, The Kids Are All Right (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.
Just in time for the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon, this program celebrates disability activism and activists, including former Jerry’s Kids, and a group of kick-ass teenage girls living with disabilities and making media about it, the Empowered Fe Fes (slang for female). Kerry Richardson’s The Kids Are All Right (2005) is a documentary about a renegade Jerry’s Kid named Mike Ervin. A Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) poster child in the 1960’s, today Mike is a disability rights activist who challenges the MDA’s use of pity to raise money in its telethon. In Salome Chasnoff’s Beyond Disability (2004), the Fe Fes talk to folks on the street and get candid interviews regarding people’s reactions to disability when confronted with these young women who are not afraid to talk about anything. Dealing with growing up, sexuality, education and employment, these girls tell it like it is and force us all to reconsider our relationships to physical ability, grappling with discrepancies in their self-perception and the way the world sees them (KJ Mohr). 2004-2005, various directors, USA, ca. 60 min, video.