This essay film asks what it means to be an audience, in the wake of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which claims but often fails to prohibit discrimination against disabled workers and audiences in the United States. Tangling common sense representations of disability, labor, and national identity, the film questions the purported goodness of putting disabled people to work in underpaid contexts ranging from captioning and transcribing to fabricating textiles for the U.S. military.
The film is open captioned and audio described in English. Description of still image: Soldiers lower to the ground, doing a training exercise in a green space in a park, framed by a black border. Beneath the image there’s a caption that reads: “Or another way of saying it is: how these images are put to work.”
Produced with Abby Sun
Re-recording Mix by Emile Klein
Special Thanks to Shoumik Bhattacharya, Ekrem Serdar, Tiffany Sia, Park McArthur, Jason Hirata, Reid Davenport, Keith Wilson, Emily Lim Rogers, Arom Choi, Johanna Hedva, Pooja Rangan, Em Hedditch, Emerson Goo