Pac Rim 2024

Pre-Conference Events

theaterblurred

SUPERFEST Disability Film Festival

Monday, February 26, 2024
6:00 PM (HST)

Hawaiʻi Convention Center, Lili’u Theatre
1801 Kalākaua Ave, Honolulu, HI 96815

Overview

We are delighted to announce that, in cooperation with the Paul Longmore Institute on Disability, Pac Rim 2024 will host SUPERFEST Disability Film Festival. 

The internationally renowned event will be available without charge to participants on February 26th, 2023.

SUPERFEST is the world’s oldest Disability Film Festival. This community wide event will take place at the Hawaii Convention Center as a pre-conference event on February 26th, immediately before the conference begins.

Superfest lets disabled audiences join to enjoy films accurately reflecting and Disability while also bringing to light stories marginalized inside disability community. It is one of the few festivals worldwide that is accessible to disabled filmgoers of all kinds. In addition, it educates audiences (non-disabled and disabled) to challenge stereotypes of disability (historical and current).

The Line Up

Invisible World (5 min): To apply for a disabled parking placard, a doctor within the state must approve the application. This film is a record of the filmmaker’s introduction to healthcare in the state of Utah. Her processing of the appointment and consequential aftermath as a video object serves as a reclamation and assertion for understanding disability and the physical world otherwise.

The Beauty of Being Deaf (3 min): Artist, director, and author Chella Man presents a meditation on Deaf identity and language—underwater.

(Un)fit to Work (5 min): A disabled mechanic takes us on a musical journey of 80s disco & ballroom after his local job center denies him access to work.

Take Me Home (16 min): After their mother’s death, a cognitively disabled woman and her estranged sister must learn to communicate in order to move forward.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway? (5 min): A darkly funny mockumentary about two identically disabled forty-year-old women, Lottie and Charlie, who have athetoid cerebral palsy. Both celebrate their 40th birthday with family and friends—one is given the choice and the ability to communicate, and the other is not.

Chronic (9 min): Following a traumatic brain injury, a young woman’s recovery is interrupted when her friends insist she come out for a birthday party. After reinjuring herself, she takes the first step in her new life by joining a chronic pain support group.

As You Are (15 min): When an interabled queer couple spends the night together for the first time, they must confront their complex relationships with desire, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and what it means truly to love another person. (Includes frank discussion of sexuality. Intended for mature audiences)

Me If I Were A Woman (27 min): Juliette, a 19-year-old with Down syndrome, is experiencing her first love, but her romance is quickly upended when Juliette is pressured by her mother and doctors to undergo sterilization surgery because of her disability. She has only a short time to make a decision and make her voice heard. (Includes frank discussion of sexuality. Intended for mature audiences)

TOTAL RUNTIME: 85 Minutes

About the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability

The Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability continues its founder’s legacy by working at the intersection of scholarship and advocacy to celebrate people with disabilities as innovative forces for social change. Paul K. Longmore, a historian of disability, activist and polio survivor, started the Institute on Disability in 1996. When he passed away in August 2010, Longmore left a legacy that the Institute seeks to honor and expand. SF State and generous donors created an endowment for the Institute, and in 2012, hired professor Catherine Kudlick as director and Emily Beitiks, Ph.D., to serve as the associate director.

The Institute is a research service organization which provides a supportive infrastructure for activities complementary to the social justice mission of the University and resides in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts. In addition to our director and associate director, the Institute has Longmore Student Fellows and a nine-person advisory council.

Contact

Dr. Raphael Raphael
rraphael@hawaii.edu