 Thank you for being here and thank you so much for attending the annual kickoff of our wonderful on the same page program. I'm Ben Hermelin. I'm the executive vice chancellor and provost here at UC Berkeley. On the same page is one of the ways Berkeley welcomes and engages you in this university's vibrant community by provoking every new student, not provoking, by providing every new student with a shared intellectual experience, a work of art to be considered and discussed by all, we are opening the door to the communal experience that is such an integral part of a meaningful world-class college education. It is a strong supportive campus community that allows us to take intellectual risks, continuously challenge the status quo, to learn from one another and to thrive amidst an amazing diversity of interests, origins and perspectives. I want to emphasize the value we place on diversity of perspectives because the phrase on the same page often connotes a desire to arrive at a common understanding. That's not what is intended. Rather, on the same page is the opportunity for a shared experience that fosters a discussion from multiple perspectives and therefore an opportunity to learn from them. This year's selection is the documentary film Crip Camp, A Disability Revolution directed by Nicole Noonam and Jim Lebrecht, who we are lucky to have as our honored guests this evening. Crip Camp premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the audience award. It was then released on Netflix and nominated for an Academy Award. Our selection committee, made up of faculty, staff, deans, students and librarians, chose this film because it changed the way that they see the world. I hope that after watching the film you agree. Crip Camp provides students and faculty from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds with all sorts of opportunities and avenues to engage and consider the content in their own ways. The film welcomes and rewards thought and reflection, a standard we hope and intend to uphold across our curriculum. As one student reviewer said, Crip Camp is full of fun, joy and love and a film that everyone should see. Before I introduce tonight's guests, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge last week's passing of a distinguished member of our campus community and an exceptional guest. He is the chair of our campus community and an executive producer of tonight's film, Raymond Lyftschuss. Lyftschuss, professor emeritus of architecture and city and regional planning, was a pioneer in incorporating accessibility and disability justice into design education. He taught at Berkeley for more than 50 years, beginning in 1972. He received the university's distinguished teaching award in 1976 and the Berkeley Citation in 2008. He was honored with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor Award in 2002. This spring, Berkeley awarded him with the Fiat Lux Faculty Award. He was involved in the protests that led to the implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that created legal rights for people with disabilities in California and eventually led to the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act. In the words of Renee Chow, William W. Worcester, Dean of the College of Environmental Design, Reh was an inspiring and generous teacher, remembered for his formative writing workshops in socially conscious studios. He embodied the Berkeley ethos and his insistence that the built environment should be accessible to all. Now let me introduce tonight's speakers. Nicole Newnam is an Oscar-nominated Emmy-winning documentary producer and director, five-time Sundance Film Festival alumnus, and seven-time Emmy nominee. She most recently directed The Disappearance of Shear Height, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by IFC Films this fall. And two episodes of the Emmy-nominated ESPN Landmark Title IX Series 37 words. Nicole co-directed and produced a 2021 Academy Award nominated documentary Crip Camp with Jim LeBrecht. The film won the Sundance Audience Award, as I've said, the IDA Best Featured Documentary Award, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature, and a Peabody. Nicole has produced two virtual reality films with artist director Lynette Walworth that have won an Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary, the Breakthrough VR Work Collisions in 2017, and Aua Vena in 2019. Both films premiered at the Sundance New Frontiers and were featured in installation form at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nicole's other acclaimed documentaries include the Emmy-nominated films The Revolutionary Optimists, Sentenced Home, and The Rape of Europa, a graduate of Oberlin College and Stanford University's documentary film graduate program. Nicole lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and sons. Jim LeBrecht co-directed and co-produced with Nicole this movie that we just saw, the 2021 Oscar-nominated Sundance Film Festival Award winner, Audience Award winner, and he has over 40 years of experience as a film and theater sound designer, mixer, filmmaker, and disability rights advocate. Jim is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Jim is a co-founder of FWD-Doc and the One in Four Coalition, two organizations that support people with disabilities in the entertainment industry. He is a member of the first cohort of the Disability Futures Fellowship and Innovation of the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Nunam and LeBrecht are joined in conversation tonight by Karen Nakamura, a cultural and visual anthropologist, a member of our faculty, who researches disability in contemporary Japan in the United States. Professor Nakamura's first book was titled Deaf in Japan, Signing and the Politics of Identity in 2006. Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled A Disability of the Soul and Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan in 2014. She's currently working on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in post-war Japan, as well as a project on disability technology and access, especially in the context of artificial intelligence. Please join me in welcoming Nicole Nunam, Jim LeBrecht, and Karen Nakamura at to the stage. Quite an incredible introduction and I'm very excited to be here with the two filmmakers who created Crip Crab. I thought before we started the Q&A and you guys submitted really great questions. It's just a very brief moment of science. Ben had already mentioned Ray Liftshade who had passed away recently, but we also want to recognize Neal Jacobson, who very sadly passed away, Holland Delio, of course Judith Heumann. We've lost many ancestors. Many of the people in the film have moved on to become ancestors this year. And of course, Stacey became an ancestor in the making of the film as well. So many of the community have become our ancestors. So just a brief moment. Okay, thank you. It's so impossible for me to be in this position without just totally fangirling opens. I mean, this is a huge film and this is amazing, right? Isn't that great? And so I have a question which comes out of also one of the questions that somebody had submitted, which is when was the moment you knew this was going to be amazing, right? So the origin story, like Jim says that you've been friends for a while and Jim says he wants to, you know, he has this idea about a film about his summer camp. And I can imagine I would do a little eye roll. It's like, yeah, summer camp. But can you tell us about like just the origin story a bit? And then that moment when you knew, hey, this is going to be really amazing. Yeah, I mean, Jim and I had worked together for 15 years. He was the sound mixer and sound designer that I would always bring my projects to. And I think we kind of met each other when we were both sort of starting out more or less. And that was respective careers. And we had a great collaboration. And at a certain point, he said, you know, I'm starting a foundation and I want to start producing films about from my community. And to be totally honest with you at that point in time, I don't think I really knew there was a disability community. So that was really intriguing to me. And he said, I'd like to, you know, take you out to lunch and just pitch you some ideas. And at the end of that lunch, he said, after pitching me a bunch of very interesting ideas, he said, but what I really always wanted to make a film about was my summer camp. And like you said, I did roll my eyes a little bit inwardly, because everybody wants to make a film about their summer camp, because summer camp is the best time of, you know, a lot of people's lives. And it was really, really important to them, but not everybody's camp deserves to be, you know, a two hour long documentary film. So, but then he started telling me about like this connection, all these people from this camp. First off, he was like, no, you don't really understand. It was like Woodstock, we were getting high with the counselors. It was like, you know, there were rock festivals going on, all this stuff. And I was like, what is he trying to tell me about? Anyway, he sent me a link to a Facebook page where people from Camp Genet had collected pictures over the years. And I think the proof, as you've now seen in the film, is kind of in those photographs, right? Like, I had never seen a community like that. And I've had this really powerful emotional response. Like, I want to know how that happened. And I want to know why I don't have that image in my head. And I want to go. Like, I want to go have fun with those people, you know? So, I called you up. And I think, you know, then it was like the process of, actually, I shouldn't be directing this film and Jim producing it, you know, that really the important thing was Jim's perspective and his lived experience. And so we decided to do it together. You know, I remember very vividly when you said, I'm on board, but I want us to make this together. And for me, that was because I, you know, I wanted you to tell this story because of, I've worked with a lot of documentary filmmakers and you're one of the best. And really my, I felt like there was a story here that was going to be lost in history. And for me, the, I mean, the initial ideas, all these people moved from New York out to Berkeley. And, you know, why was that? And, and, but the conversation quickly grows into, yeah, the summer camp and the community there. And is there a connection? And in fact, Nicole said, great. So there's this connection to the disability rights movement. I said, don't just, let's make a phone call. And we call Judy human. And Judy said, absolutely, there was. Yeah. This film, but the real turning point is when you find this film archive, can you talk about that? Because up to then you just had static images, which wouldn't make much of a film. That's a really good point. And at first we were like, well, maybe we should make like a giant photo exhibit and a gallery of these pictures, you know? But then we started thinking, no, there really should be a movie. And we knew there was footage of the 504. And we thought, well, maybe we'll recreate the scenes at the camp and we'll, we'll cast young disabled actors. And that'll be, and we'll recreate camp, you know, and that'll be really amazing. And so actually the first grants we got and the work we first started to do were based around that concept. We held on to for a ridiculously long amount of time, actually, even after we found the footage. But then Jim, you know, you had a memory that maybe there was some footage that might exist. No, I remembered that this one summer that this group of videographers had shown up at Camp Genet and they'd actually given, well, given me the camera, this thing was a large camera with a large cable that they strapped to the handlebars of my wheelchair, the deck for it. And I did a camp tour. And the only thing I really remember was that the word people was in the name of the organization. And Nicole, I think you like spent like three or four months scouring the internet until you finally found a recently digitized videographers magazine from back in the day. And there was an ad in the back. What, what did it say? It's like crab epidemic at Camp Genet for the handicapped 695. People's, people's video theater. We had the name people's video theater. We're able to find some names of people involved in it. They didn't know, they didn't know they passed us on. Finally, they said, well, you should talk to Howard Gutstatt. He might know. And so I started trying to find a Howard Gutstatt. And I found a guy they put that name on the board listed as being on the board of an anarchist bookstore in San Francisco. And so I called them and I said, can you put me in touch with Howard Gutstatt? And I said, well, we're not allowed to do that, but he is on our board. And all if you want to write a note and leave it here, we'll give it to him at the next board meeting. So sure enough, like Jim and I were working away on our ideas about recreating scenes from the camp when we got an email from Howard and he said, we have five and a half hours of footage. We were there for a week filming. And he remembered you. And we went and met him in a cafe in San Francisco. And when we came in, he burst into tears. Because you can imagine, like they were there filming this. They were there filming as part of a radical video coalition. So they weren't just like shooting something like the news. They were really there to empower the community. And they were there to kind of help change and evolve the way the campers saw themselves. And so I think for Jim to be now picking up the story and telling it through his own voice so many years later was just overwhelming to them. And I think that's probably the moment we knew we had something really, really amazing on our hands. That was even before we started. Yeah, then the day that we got, so they were in the process of getting their tapes digitized. We were able to help pay for the rest of the tapes to be digitized. But the day this hard drive showed up in my office at the, what's known as the Fancy Building here in Berkeley, and there were these videos. And we just started going one after the other. And it was, we'd stop once in a while and just look at each other. And for me, it was like, like discovering these home movies that I didn't know had been shot and seeing people who I really, really, truly missed who are no longer with us. And but then we came across that scene of everybody talking around the table and Nancy Rosenblum talking about, you know, and having a hard time being understood by some of us that what she really missed was her privacy. And it wasn't even clear to us exactly what was being, well, we found out what was being said after we saw it, how Steve interpreted her. And I mean, you said to me, if we can build the film up to this moment and make it work, this is like. And I think we did that. But you can also see like just how Judy is also, Judy Heumann is her leadership and her empathy coming through there. And just how she managed to become, you know, in the State Department leading disability rights across the world. And that kernel is there in the summer camp. And it's just amazing to see that. I mean, the parallels between trying to figure out, are we going to have lasagna when the cook is off or not? Do we have to have so much starch? And then seeing the parallels between that and how meetings during the takeover of the federal building, there were these parallels there that were just stunning. Although a bit of me kind of wants to see the chibi, the reenactments with a small Jim LeVec played by someone and a small Judy Heumann. I don't know if you've gone to casting, maybe sometime you can leak the casting tapes for those. You know, the small Judy Heumann, I mean, for me, one of the most amazing discoveries was that Neil Jacobson and Judy Heumann and Nancy Rosenblum was just referencing that they were all in kindergarten class together and that they had formed, you know, a community, an elementary school. And it was a community that had self-care. They took care of each other. It was a, you know, cross disability community. It had, even in that way, you know, Judy and Judy was leading it, you know, and it leveraged the talents of everyone. So I felt really excited about that because how often do you get the chance to kind of rewind back from a moment like the 504 sit-in all the way back to like the seeds of a community, you know, that actually empowered people to go on and do the things they did at Jeannette and then to go on and do the things they did at CIL and then in the building, that it was just like such an extraordinary thing to be able to connect those dots and tell that story. I wonder, and Jim, this is a question that comes from Emily. Was there part of making this film that changed you and changed your memories of Camp Jeannette? I was so grateful that it really reignited all of these memories there that, you know, when you see us going into the bunk and after we meet Steve, I remember what that bunk smelled like. And I'm not talking about like dirty laundry, I'm talking about, you know, the raw wood and, and, you know, the pine trees and such outside. So it really elicited a lot of feelings and I did have one moment when we were working on the film and that I almost had like a sense memory when you see me with my arm around Nancy, actually feeling what her shoulder and what she was wearing and which was a little freaky but fabulous. And who gets a chance to kind of go back and look at part of their live lives and see it over, over again through this kind of footage and really kind of consider who we were or, so I mean, obviously it did affect me how it did. I don't think I have words for that exactly. I think every time I see the film I'm processing something. I'm seeing something new or I'm remembering things but, you know, Denise, by the way, Denise share Jacobson is in the house right there and I will come to this if I don't forget this. And Dennis Phillips, you give us a shout. I think he's here. Maybe. Yeah, there he is right there. Thank you. Denise says in the film that, you know, this was kind of a utopia. And again, to kind of answer your question, you don't realize, especially at 15, really how special something is. It's like everything's kind of new. But it really was this place where for a couple of months I really, I could just be a teenager. I could just play baseball or I could just hang out or do more than hang out. And so I really, I always appreciate whenever I watch the film, that sense of being in a protected space. Really, because the world around me really didn't necessarily really want me there. Didn't really like me. Made my life much more difficult. But I have to tell you, I remember the smell of the meadow that was behind the wreck hall and the sounds. Well, through the film, you can, I think the audience, we feel that too. We weren't there, but we can, we can smell it, we can hear it. And it's an amazing experience. Another audience question is, you know, 50 years have passed from the events. And essentially, this is a film about a community that changed the world, right? So out of this community came the Rehabilitation Act and the 504 sit in and then the ADA movement. And part of my research is to understand how disability movements around the world have organized. And people in Japan were always constantly asking me, do you know Judy Human, right? Have you been to Berkeley? And just the events here were really significant. And to be part of that cohort, some of the students are asking, how can they do just a bit of that? Is there a sense at which you felt that you are changing the world? Or is it just something that just happened? Well, I mean, my contribution back in the day was more, I was still in college at UC San Diego when they were taking over the building. But yet, meeting Judy Human at Couch and Net Change really set a course for me, believing that we could actually like fight back and actually achieve gains was really made me happy. And so trying to get involved with Disabled in Action and such, and when I went off to college, it's like the Disabled Student Services were basically non-existent. And something inside of me said, well, I'm going to fix that. And starting to get, you know, a coordinator. And then when they brought in somebody part of the time I wasn't disabled, it's like, no, we got to find ourselves. Somebody who's disabled in, excuse me, UC Riverside, but I stole your coordinator to San Diego. God bless you, Randy Woodard, and helped to establish the Disabled Students' Union. So I think in my own way, I was trying to do what I could. And that's always been kind of part of my DNA. I do have a belief that the work that was happening here, the work that was happening really all over the country. And I think that when you know other people are doing the work and that you can come together, it really feeds you. And it also gives you a sense of I'm not the only one here shouting in the dark. I don't know if that was the perfect answer to your question. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. Nico, we talked in the green room a bit about the question of being an ally that sometimes comes up that there are many in the audience who are here who aren't disabled. And how do you respond to that question of what can you do as an ally? Yeah, I mean, our journey making this film has been hugely eye-opening and educating to me, not just the topic of the film and the making of the film and the meeting of all the incredible people in the film, which has been one of the great experiences of my life. But actually, Jim and I set out an intention early on to kind of use the film itself as sort of an icebreaker to pave the way for more stories like this to get told. And for the inaccessibility, we knew at a certain point it became pretty clear we were going to have a pretty large platform from which to call attention to inequities and inaccessibility and oppression that we saw, even in our own world of filmmaking. So I think what I learned is to listen and trust the experiences it was being relayed to me and then to jointly speak up. And we had to do some uncomfortable things. We had to go to the head of the Sundance Institute, which runs the festival that if we got into it would change everything for the trajectory of the film in our careers and say, it's not okay that you don't have an elevator to your filmmaker's lodge. That means that people who can't climb steep stairs don't have access to networking opportunities, et cetera. And that's just like one drop in the bucket of like almost seemed like every time we went out the door, we were dealing with something like that. And in fact, one of my greatest moments in the editing process was when we were at this lab at the Sundance Institute and this person said, well, I don't see the conflict in this story. And what's the conflict? And this other British editor said, getting through the effing door, which it sort of was true, right? Like everything was harder for us because of the way the world is inequitable for people with disabilities. And so yeah, you just have to be along for that fight and lift up the voice of the people who really know what they're talking about and not be afraid to make a stink, you know? Indeed. I mean, so often allies are sometimes have already been in the room that you've been trying to get into. And for them to be able to speak up and say, look, I mean, we had this situation that you're talking about. They had a filmmaker's lodge at Sundance. There was three flights of stairs. And why could you go but I couldn't. And but it took you who I've been banging on this for like a decade and not getting past like interns telling me, well, maybe we can have a video feed downstairs so you can see what's going on completely diminishing the fact that I've been mixing film for 20 years. Don't you want me upstairs? You know, to be part of the conversation. And so you really helped to get the attention. And they immediately moved a bunch of things out of the filmmakers lodge that year. And when we premiered, they were in the ensuing time, they had raised the money and installed an elevator. So which in typical, of course, fashion, we're writing up in the elevator. Oh, and there's a beautiful poster inside the elevator flight. Nicole and I at the lab. And people are happy. I mean, I don't think they were breaking champagne bottles, but you know, they were really happy. And then we get to the top and the door won't open. And I don't know. And when we left, there was at the end of that day, there was a board member downstairs crying. We tried so hard. But let me just say one more thing about allyship. I mean, I think this is the point that you want to do it. And as what you said, you want to do this together. And that but when you're in a space in which you realize that there's inequity, and I I really embrace this well beyond disability, that I think that it's incumbent upon all of us to say something, to really advocate saying what, we don't have everybody here at the table. There are people missing. And I'll say one other thing, especially to the, you know, the incoming students that, you know, my thought about allyship initially was, well, support your disabled student's organization and, you know, such or, you know, take a wheelchair user at the lunch or whatever, right? But what I think is really most important is that within your circle or within your organization or your special interest group, you look and see, do we have people from my community? And my community is very, very broad. Do we have people here? And if we don't, why? Is it that we have barriers set up or that we haven't simply made it clear that we're welcoming everyone? Because within your, for lack of a better term, silo, when you're making sure that my community is involved, it's much more powerful and it has much greater impact that lasts a lifetime. I think what strikes a lot of people is some of the intersections of disability and race that you touch upon in the film. And I was wondering if you could speak to some of them. There's obviously there's an intersection with many of the individuals are Jewish. And that also fits into it. But also the African American community. Can you touch upon any of those intersections? Yeah, I mean, I think it was kind of extraordinary timing in a way that the film came out in the summer of 2020. And and we got a lot of feedback from people about how meaningful it was for them to see intersectionality represented in the 504 and the 504 activism and in the community there, because, you know, it was almost like this model from the past that people hadn't even known existed, you know. And I myself was surprised too by looking into the archival footage and hearing the conversations that were happening in the language that was being used. It's that kind of feeling of like, oh, I thought we kind of invented this 15 years ago. We started talking about this. But no, you know, it's, I feel the film is really one of those things where we're trying to give back something that shouldn't have been taken away from us. Like it should have been a continual conversation. We should know that this protest happened and that in this protest, it was only successful because people were respectful of intersecting identities and commonalities across different forms of oppression and they were supporting each other and they were listening to each other and respecting each other's truths. So showing that in the film was really important to us. But then it turned out that summer that it was, you know, more important than we could have imagined and that people were actually screening the film outside, you know, at protests and things like that. So it was enormously important. And to your point about, you know, the Jewish identity of a lot of people at Camp Jened and in the film, I think that's very important. That was something that Denise Jacobson called our attention to right away. You know, and you think about Judy coming from a family of Holocaust survivors and Neil as well. I mean, I was actually talking to Corbett O'Toole this morning and she was reminding me that that's kind of a key reason why Kitty Cohn and Judy would have been so incredibly aware that it was really important for them to be fighting for disability writ large and not to be caving to the demands that were being made at the time to like, oh, well, let's say that people with addiction problems are not part of the disability group that's going to be covered by 504, but to really fight for a very expansive definition of disability because, you know, of knowing from history the consequence of allowing the community to start to be divided up and to say this group isn't a part or that group isn't a part. So I think it's a really important essential part of the story. This comes out of one of the questions that was also asked, but eugenics also plays a role. I mean, eugenics was behind both the Holocaust, but also the continuing desexualization of disabled kids. And one of the things I really like is that you show, Jimmy said earlier, disabled kids were just as teenagers, right, in the fullest sense. And yeah, that people are hooking up. And that is an important, really important concept that allowed people to see themselves as sexual beings. I mean, I think that the camp wanted us to really develop and find our identity. And that was certainly part of the time also of a great deal of freedom and freedom of thought and sexual freedom. And yeah, I might certainly, they provided me a wonderful platform for experiencing that and which really, I mean, I make a joke, but in all seriousness, you know, that wasn't happening outside of Camp Shannad either. So I mean, I think that we've heard from a lot of people, they didn't expect the amount of joy or humor in our film. And they probably didn't expect so much talking about sex or just, you know, us as complete human beings. Well, Jay asks a great question on here about how did you, within the disability community, you know, we're very cautious of inspiration porn, right, material that's done that shows disabled people are great, they can wake up and eat breakfast. And how did you, what were some of the conversations in the editing room? Were there moments where you're like, Jim, you're like, oh, I think this is getting a bit inspiration point. You know, I think that we kind of really had a good grasp of that going into this about, you know, we had learned from so many different people about this. And Stella Young's Ted Talk was something that was, if you're not familiar with that, Stella Young had this great Ted Talk about inspiration porn. So I think that, you know, certainly this was something that was always going to be in our minds. But we had an incredible group of people working with us, you know, wonderful editors and creatives and such. So I think you're being very kind, but I do remember, I didn't know I do remember you redirecting us sometimes or sometimes even, even we would put something together, you and I believing that it was going to have, you know, the intended effect. Like I think about like your first, you know, your car. Like I think that story is an awesome story. But something about the way it was put together or the music or something, it had a little bit of that feel, you know, I feel, I definitely, I think it was very interesting to me to see that sometimes even when we would cut something together when we would show it to people, their response would be kind of like, oh, that's so cute or whatever. It might be like, okay, we're going to cut that out. What are you nuts? Or our first sizzle reel that we put together, which you use for fundraising, we're like all patting ourselves in the back and our editor's wife comes back and says, it seems like a house of horrors. You know, and it's like, well, It's everywhere. Yeah. So I mean, what did they mean by that, a house of horrors? They just, we kind of, I mean, it's just sometimes when we're working on something, you just don't really kind of see it with a fresh mind. We were like, you know, embracing that kind of hippiness in the crabs epidemic and letting it all hang out and everything. And she was like, are they taking good care of those children? Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think this is the thing that I do remember like there was something in one scene that was bugging me and I couldn't figure it out. And basically we just kind of put a pin in it. And literally a couple of months later, I kind of went, aha, and I figured it out. And I wish I could tell you what it was. I have an equivalent. But this is the working relationship that we all had was that respecting each other and knowing that we could always be heard. And look, I probably by that point had mixed 180 documentaries the first time I'm in the editing room for all this time. And I appreciate what I learned. And I just say it's just a rare collaboration is all I'm trying to say. And I just I feel very fortunate. I feel very fortunate that we were able to make this film because the impact throughout really throughout the world has been amazing. And I don't think you get a chance to, you know, do something positive in this world and lift people up on such a broad scale. I think you're fortunate if you ever get a chance to do something like that. I'm not trying to make embarrass us or pat ourselves in the back. But I just I think we have to be grateful for the things in life that we've been able to pull off and not be conceited about it. And I think that if you imagine, especially if you're like the incoming students, there's no reason that your passion or your quest or the things that you really want to do can't really affect a broad group of people and make a positive change. And I really want you to hold on to that because right now we're like in this period of time where just everything feels like it's falling apart and going backwards. But I'm not a I'm not a blithe optimist, but I also believe that it's possible for you to find something you want to do and find your community and build something. And this film shows how that's possible. This is a question of thumbs up. There's a theme in some of the questions, which is that there's this nostalgia for this utopia. And I think many of us identify as disabled. We never got to experience that sense of community. And not just in 1971, but there's also the sense that you guys have continued it, right? You and Denise and Neil Reston-Piece and Judy and you all stayed in touch and created a community. And the current generation doesn't quite have that. I mean, for all the blessings that we have, we never had camp genets and we were mainstreamed and things like that. And so I'm sure you got this question before. Do we need new camp genets or how do we recreate that sense of cohesion and friendship? So in developing the film and trying to figure out our impact campaign, which our friend Rosie was very much a part of, Rosie, thank you so much. We learned what was really important to people was creating community. And that, and we were able to make that happen by putting our impact campaign in the hands of Stacy Milburn and Andrea Levant, who are deeply steeped in disability justice. And wound up creating, when the pandemic hit, we had like had to change what we were going to be doing. And they said, we've got this. And we wound up having like 15, 16 weeks of virtual Crip Camps every Sunday for that summer of 2020. And at the beginning, we had maybe 100 people signed up. And at the end, there were 10,000 people signed up to either participate live or to see the videos later. And then so I mean, yes, should there be more camp genets? Yes, there should. But what does that mean? That that really means a place for people to come together, to learn from each other. And to you find that community, because Lord knows, I learned so much just from the summers I was there. And I was, I was mainstreamed before the people were mainstreamed. And so this is where I learned to be have, instead of being embarrassed to be prideful for who I was. And so I think what I'm trying to say, there's many ways to recreate camp. And in fact, but what does the Corbett says in our film, you know, that all these people from Genet came out, what did they do? They can recreate a camp in Berkeley. Right. So can you tell us a bit about Ford doc, the organization that you're making to help create more stories? Forward. Forward doc. Yeah. Oh, thank you. I mean, it's part of the activist world here that there's an organization called the International Documentary Association. And back in 2016, they were having their biannual convention. And it was all about inclusivity. And there was nothing about disability. And I spoke up. And two years later, they supported the idea of having a panel on disabled documentary filmmakers. And then we had a convening in an adjacent room. And like, so many other kind of groups that kind of come together at festivals or conventions like this, like a doc, which is a group of Asian filmmakers or Brown Girls doc mafia. Out of that convening came a group of us that started something. Forward doc, fwd.dash doc, which is filmmakers with disabilities. And we have, we become this force, and especially in the doc world and the festival world, for breaking down barriers and confronting ableism and really a voice to help organizations to add accessibility to their DEI. And we have about 800 members now on our Facebook group and support from foundations. So again, we created Camp Gened by coming together as a group and learning from each other and supporting each other. And there are allies there. They're not like counselors, but they are, they are allies. So it's something that I'm really, you know, grateful again. Thank you for asking that. This is what Nicole, there are many sort of film, potential filmmakers in the audience. And they want to know, how do you get started? As a filmmaker? Yeah, as a filmmaker. You know, it's funny. I was at an event like this in college, and I saw a film about Harvey Milk, a documentary about Harvey Milk made by a couple of filmmakers from the Bay Area. And it totally changed my life. Like it, it showed me that by being exposed to the truth through film, that I could, I could shift the way I saw things and that that could be really liberatory for me. And so I think, I think a lot about that experience of watching that film and how much it inspired me to want to try to tell stories like that. And one thing I specifically loved about that film was that it was a community held story and it was told through, by the community, which is one of the reasons I think why I was so attracted to trying to work with Jim to tell this story. So I went back to the place that I was from, and which is an island near Seattle, and I told the story that I was most compelled to tell, which was about a friend of ours whose family had been among the, it was the first Japanese American community to be interned in the war. And this family had a beautiful garden that had been pilfered and destroyed by the neighbors. And that was the story of reclaiming that garden. And I, you know, I'd used that film to get into film school. And I worked for many, many years as a researcher, assistant associate producer, et cetera, until, you know, one day I read a book that I thought, oh, this could be a big film. And I banded together with a number of my friends from graduate school and spent seven years trying to raise the money to make a film called The Rape of Europa, which was, you know, the story of, yeah, of, you know, what happened to Europe's cultural property and artwork in World War II and people's efforts to save it and kind of looking at why did the Nazis spend so much effort and time trying to attack culture and what does culture mean to people. So, and, you know, along the way, I met people in jobs that I was on that had stories that were very compelling and urgently seemed to need to be told. And I would start working on those films, too. And those are the ones I brought to Jim. And it's just evolved. I've never, I've always had kind of like films I'm making to make money and films that I'm making because they're kind of like these passion projects that I can't get out of my head and they're connected to people that I love. So, yeah, that's, that's how it happened. But it did all literally start in an auditorium like, like this one. I think instead of saying to yourself, I mean, what I'm saying is why not, why not you? Well, you know, play around, do something. And there's plenty of, you know, tools out there now that are free or very affordable. And, you know, who's to say that you don't have something really wonderful to make. And whether it's a two minute film, or whether it's much longer than that, it's, I mean, the beautiful thing about art is that if you choose to share it, you're giving something to people. I was just going to ask that because I think one of the things about this generation is that they are the TikTok Instagram generation. And for many, you know, this might be the first long form documentary film that they've seen. I know talking, I know talking to my students that many of them have not sat through long material. For them, two minutes is a pretty long TikTok. What do you see? Do you see a future in short form? We were talking earlier about five minute films. But is short form the future or should we abandon narrative film? No, I mean, one thing I don't know why this popped into my head, but give the people what they want, right? So some people are gotten used to watching things on their commute or just, and I can do scroll with the best of them watching things on YouTube. But I think a good story is a good story. And I think the heart, one of the hardest things about editorial and creating it is really trying to find what is the right, the right length isn't really the point. But what, you know, what moves the story across, what gets to it. And so, you know, and like any documentary filmmaker, our first assembly was two and a half hours long. They wanted us to get it eventually down to 90 minutes. We got it to 100 minutes, which was really felt like lifting 500 pounds just to get that like last 10 minutes out of the film. It was really painful. I mean, there were stories about Denise's backstory and of her life that wound up having to leave the film and, you know, stories about Lionel, the counselor from the south, and how his, like his church came out to when he flew up to New York, like he had never been on an airplane. And just wonderful stories that just in the long run just didn't really quite fit in the film. But there are a couple of things on YouTube. And one of them is a delightful, we put the skillet for Valentine's Day a few years ago. But Anne Capolo, you saw in there with the gray hair, when we shot over to their house to interview Anne, Sam, her husband was there and he was like making his coffee and pastries. And we just started talking with them. And they wound up really Sam kind of talking about how they got together. And it was just a lovely, just great love story. And the one story that sticks out within that story is that, you know, Anne knew Judy and by that she knew Sam. And Sam had been sitting on the fence about, you know, should I propose or not? And she goes, Samela, she's not going to wait forever, you know, with that brooklet accent. So anyway, we're wrapping up. I have a couple of quick questions. Is Denise as funny in person as she is in this film? I am a fangirl of her. Yes. And it was really wonderful to, as in knowing Neil and Denise, that Neil always got the two biggest laughs in the film. And just both of you, yes, yes she is. And yes they are and yes they were. And anyway. And the, I think that's the clap. Yeah, this is incredible. And the last question is, how did the Obamas get involved and what was meeting them like? Well, you know, we were trying to find a partner for the film and we had a sales agent were going around and our executive producer, Howard Gertler, who's a great guy, he suddenly called up one morning and he said, oh my God, I just read in the trades that the Obamas are starting a production company called Hire Ground. And we have to get this film in front of them because, you know, President Obama worked with Judy Heumann. He, and you know, I think you, if you, it's not a big stretch to think that he would be interested in a story like this because these are the stories he tells and this is the way he thinks about politics and organizing and how change is made. So we were very excited about it, but it still seemed like a complete fantasy. And our sales agent went and kind of accosted the woman who had just been hired to run the company named Priya Swaminathan. And she's an incredible producer and said, you know, we have this short tape of this project and, you know, we want to share it with you. At that point we had a big mess of like a three-hour assembly or something. And, but we did have this little sizzle reel of the project. And she said, okay, I'll watch it. And apparently like she watched it and she couldn't believe it. And she sent it to President Obama and Mrs. Obama. And they said, we can't believe this story hasn't been told. You know, how is it possible really that we could actually be involved with telling this story? So this was actually their first, their first film that they produced as part of their production company. They had acquired a film at Sundance called American Factory, which was really amazing. But this was the first one that they were involved in actually producing. And they gave notes. President Obama called us the night of the premiere and told us not to read the comments on Instagram. And, and, and also he told us that we should not think that anything about the reviews or the response to the film immediately was what was important, but that we should look for the long tail. Yeah, he said, look, I have made a film, but I've written a book and, you know, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point someone's going to come up to you and say, you know, your film really changed my life. And I think we got that within 24 hours. He also came to the virtual camp that Rosie helped to run and he, and he wanted to chat about s'mores and sing songs and, and talk with all the people gathered there, which was really incredible too. Their support of the project was, was really genuine and really incredible. Well, unfortunately, we have to wrap up. There are many more on the same page events that are going to happen. One of them is going to involve Dennis Phillips. Well, he doesn't quite know, no, but it is going to involve him on November 29th. We're going to have an event that talks about the Panthers involvement and the, and the intersections between black communities and disability communities, which I think will be absolutely amazing. We're going to have a good lineup for that, but look for other events on, on the same page. And then echoing what both of Jim and Nicole said, there are so many stories in this world and you have, you have many of them, your elders have many of them, go talk to them, hear their stories and, and tell them. I think that's how we build that sort of community that, that Jim was saying, the networks. Do you guys have, have an ending note that you want to finish us up on? I'm just, no, I'm, I'm pretty darn happy right now. So thank you, Karen. Yeah, thank you, Karen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Berkeley. So, yeah. Thank you for selecting this film. And everyone, yeah, you're going to have an amazing time at Berkeley. So welcome and looking forward to all that you do here and beyond. Thanks. Thank you.