I went to The Film Bunch show in Bethnal Green in London on Thursday night, because they were showing ‘Dr Hairy in: Mince Pies’. It was well worth the effort: really nice people, and some really interesting short films, most of them far more professional-looking than my own. The theme of the evening was ‘DIY films’, so I was hoping they’d all be a bit crappy like mine, but no such luck.
The Film Bunch as an organisation seeks to promote access to film and film-making for people who are hard of hearing. Shaz, the founder and main organiser, is hard of hearing herself (although you wouldn’t know it to talk to her); all the films they show are subtitled; and for the Q&A sessions at the end of each half of the show, they had somebody doing signing, and somebody else typing the conversation so that it could be shown in text on a back-screen.
Amongst other people I got chatting to a guy called Oscar Kraft (in fact I started by chatting to his father, a Rabbi called Niel, mainly because he was the oldest-looking bloke in the room apart from myself). Oscar had a film in the show about Non-Verbal Learning Disability (NVLD), a condition he has himself. He has now sent me the link for a video of the Q&A session the two of us took part in, at the end of the first half of the show. Oscar is sitting to my left, and comes across as completely self-possessed and self-confident. The girl to my right is Jennifer Juan, who had a rather nice poem-video in the show called ‘Love is Love’. Here’s the video:
