Murray State's Cinema International program features the 2018 documentary, The Artisans, this week. The Canadian film celebrates the employees at the Atelier Artisan, an organization that trains adults with intellectual disabilities to become craftspeople. It follows a year at a vocational rehabilitation center in New Brunswick, Canada, showcasing the program participants' diverse personalities, work, and daily lives without labeling them by diagnosis, instead emphasizing the community they create with one another. Co-director of Cinema International, Dr. Tamara Feinstein, and assistant professor of English, Dr. Rebecca Rosen, spoke with WKMS Morning Edition host Daniel Hurt ahead of the screenings.
"Last semester, we showed Crip Camp, the documentary about the camp that led to a group of people who generated what became the Americans with Disabilities Act," Rosen begins. "The Artisans is a slightly different kind of documentary but also really dovetails nicely with what we're doing in disability studies that we're teaching this fall. It's about a group of adults with intellectual disabilities who work at a center in French Canada. It's a little over 50 minutes long, and it traces basically a year in the life of this center, where they practice what we might call here vocational rehabilitation, giving people access to jobs and activities." These activities can be craft work, like woodworking, but there are also discussions on issues like sustainability.
"Some of them have Down syndrome. Some of them may be on the autism spectrum. But what I think is interesting is it doesn't identify any of their diagnoses or their ages," Rosen continued. "But instead lets us get to know them as individuals through their own words and through their work and play. I think it shows how vocational rehabilitation and similar services can work while also making clear that this is a collection of people with very different personalities. Some of them are quite pensive and philosophical when they do their voice-overs in their in-person interviews. Some of them are very playful and like to joke a lot."
"They comfort each other when they're grieving or confused. They collaborate on art projects and craft work and also in the recycling center that they operate. They go on field trips, they stay at work, and all the while, you're engaging with their collective and then their individual senses of time. So, it's a short documentary, but you really feel a sense of just how each person's pacing is different. Some move more quickly. Some move more slowly and more meditatively. It's not frantic. There's a lot of really intentional work, and again, it has almost a meditative pace."
Feinstein said she hopes viewers of the documentary will feel the sense of love and connection between the individuals in the film and see that they are able to tell their own stories. "I think what really shines through the documentary is this sense of community and love between the different members of that workshop," Feinstein said. "I think what's interesting about that particular documentary, and this isn't Michael Moore, where the director's kind of in front of the camera, narrating it, that director has made a clear decision to have the
folks that he's looking at actually narrate and tell their story. So, it's got a much more organic feel to it than maybe some other documentaries."
Murray State University Cinema International presents The Artisans on Thursday, October 17, and Saturday, October 19. Both screenings begin at 7:30 pm in Faculty Hall, room 208, on Murray State's main campus. For more information on the Cinema International program, including upcoming screenings and how to donate, visit its website.
