The Kids Are All Right & Beyond Disability: The Fe Fe Stories
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | September 1, 2005
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.
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Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
