Film Screenings: Moving Towards Disability Inclusivity

Crip Time is a short durational, moving image work in which the artist is seen from a birds-eye view replenishing days of the week pill boxes with medication. Filmed in real time, there is a frustration with the length and mundanity of the task, as the viewer is invited into the lived reality of the additional, invisible labour involved in being chronically ill. The title refers to the notion of crip time, which considers the need for not only extra time, but flexibility in time, within disabled communities; rejecting capitalist notions of value and worth as they relate to productivity. 

Carolyn Lazard is an artist and writer based in New York and Philadelphia. They have participated in exhibitions at several institutions including KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the New Museum, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Long Take at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Their work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Venice Biennale. Lazard is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2021 United States Artists Fellow. They hold a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kyla requires 24-hour care with everything from making artwork to having a wee. Struggling with a care shortage during the pandemic, she asks filmmaker friend Lou to swap cameras for catheters and learn how to assist her in a reality tv challenge. The pair give a refreshingly personal perspective of the global care crisis, the necessity of friendship and what it means to truly care for each other.

Kyla Harris is a filmmaker, writer and activist who applies an intersectional approach to all of her work. She is a member of the Disability Screen Advisory Group for the British Film Institute (BFI) and the British Film and Television Awards (BAFTA) that advises and supports inclusivity in the industry. Kyla has been a panelist for a number of organisations where she advocates for people who share her own identities as a queer, disabled women of colour. Along with Filmmakers With Disabilities (FWD-Doc) she co-wrote A Toolkit for Inclusion & Accessibility in association with Doc Society and Netflix as well as The FWD-Doc Engagement Pack. Her short film It’s Personal, that she co-directed and wrote, was commissioned by the Film Video Umbrella and is their most viewed film to date. She is currently co-writing a television series in development with Ash Atalla from Roughcut TV. 
 
Lou Macnamara is an artist, camera assistant and documentary filmmaker. After graduating from BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, they co-directed and shot Working Illegally a short documentary that premiered at Glasgow CCA, exploring the UK’s privatised immigration detention system through the stories of detainees who work jobs inside detention centres for £1 per hour. Lou co-directed and shot Keenie Meenie a short doc about British mercenaries implicated in Sri Lankan war crimes. The film won Best International Documentary at Norway Tamil Film Festival and was described by Ken Loach as, "Important, dangerous and must be screened." The Hospital Club has named Lou as one of the 100 most influential and innovative people across the breadth of the UK’s creative industries in their Rising Star category for art and political filmmaking. 

Lizzy Rose, Journey to Film a Ruin (2009) is a never before displayed short film by the late artist Rose, in which she visits the significant site of Romney Marsh. Recording the landscapes, and lingering on ruins of old churches, Rose considers the mysticism of the locality. While once home to villages, they have since disappeared as the result of sickness and pandemics which wiped whole communities out. Two voices of Rose’s mum and stepdad are heard, reflecting on the history of the place, the nature of community and sickness; tying the work to the artist’s wider interests in overlooked spaces and communities as bodies. Shown here for the first time in an exhibition setting, the film holds new meaning in the context of the contemporary COVID-19 pandemic, which has reframed our understanding of how widespread illness can impact whole communities. 

A retrospective of Rose's work is being organised in Margate between 31 March - 23 April 2023, across multiple venues including Crate, Limbo, Well Projects and Turner Contemporary, and an evening of screenings at ICA, London on 12 April 2023. For more information visit @exhibitionforlizzy on Instagram.