In the thick of the global crisis unleashed by COVID-19, we had to rethink what Ombre e Luci would publish. What we had prepared would have felt tone-deaf in this suspended, difficult, and strange moment. And we worried that drowning ourselves in the stories of those weeks would not soothe the hunger for comfort we all, to some degree, felt we needed.
So we chose a different path: a journey through cinema and television, but with a new direction—one where we, finally, would be the protagonists. Protagonists in themes, perspectives, roles, interpretations, and in how we consume film and television. We sought stories that capture disability not by embalming it or sentimentalizing it, but by showing it truly (we know the damage Rain Man did to how we understand autism, and how vital a film like The Elephant Man can be for reflecting on difference).
Being a protagonist means many things. It means actors with disabilities who—guided by realism and poetry—play characters with disabilities. It means disability as part of the story, because it is part of life. Take Girolamo in The New Pope: you may love or hate Paolo Sorrentino's work, but the scene of Cardinal Voiello's (Silvio Orlando) homily at his friend Girolamo's funeral—Girolamo, born paralyzed and mute—showed the world a different way of seeing, one that enriches us. ("Why did I ask all of you to be here today to remember Girolamo? To right an injustice. I was the only person fortunate enough to spend time with him, and I mean to repair that wrong." Girolamo—gentle, joyful, full of life, who loves to dance, sing and laugh, who loves to listen and be listened to—"is everything we are not. And that is why we are gathered here today, to celebrate him. Because we are not like him... Because Girolamo knows how to love.").
Protagonism, then, wears many faces. There is Fabrizio Savarese, thirty-six, who, tired of movie theaters inaccessible to deaf audiences, opened a captioned cinema for the hearing-impaired in two Brescia cinemas starting in 2017. Without subtitles, he explained to Ilaria Pennacchini in L'Osservatore Romano, viewing becomes confusing and frustrating—forced to piece together the plot from actors' movements or by reading lips. Television is beginning, hesitantly, to move in the same direction. Susanna Di Pietra, who translates the Prime Minister's addresses and Civil Protection briefings into Italian Sign Language during the 6 p.m. broadcast, has become a familiar face to us all. As has Sister Veronica Donatello, who has signed the Pope's televised celebrations on Tv2000.
Of course, like literature and art, films and shows only live insofar as audiences watch them. And every audience will perceive them differently. We ourselves did not care for My Brother Chases Dinosaurs (2019), the film adaptation of Giacomo Mazzariol's beautiful book—chiefly because it flattens the Down syndrome brother into a neat little box. Yet when teachers at a Rome kindergarten brought four- and five-year-olds to see it, the children's curiosity bloomed beyond expectation, their eyes wide open to something new.
Still, we move forward in tiny steps toward making disability a shared story. America, the historic Jesuit magazine, recently published a list of the twenty-five most important films of the past twenty-five years: disability appears, barely sketched in the background, in only the rarest cases. And yet disability is there in cinema—make no mistake. For nearly forty years, Ombre e Luci has commented on—criticized and praised—films and series on the subject (and in this issue we include animation too). A simple search through our archive would have given them a truly inclusive list.