“Swept to the sidelines and forgotten“: Cultural Exclusion, Blind Persons’ Participation, and International Film Festivals

Abstract

International film festivals are privileged sites for cultural exchange and creative incubation to which blind persons are effectively excluded, a barrier that needs addressing. By recognizing barriers to film festivals, we instigate a solution to making film culture more accessible to blind persons. Using the film Blindsight as an exemplar along with a study conducted on film festivals, this paper argues a triadic thesis: that the issues of blind audience members at film festivals, blind subjects in films, and blind filmmakers must be viewed together in order to attend to cultural inclusion. We situate the paper in the domain of autobiography theory and specifically draw upon G. Thomas Couser's work Signifying Bodies for a model. Couser attends to selfrepresentation thereby enabling us to focalize the research on agency at various subject positions in the acts of participating in film culture.