Janelle Rettig looked a bit like a baby learning to walk Thursday morning as the wheelchair-ridden Johnson County supervisor pulled herself, hesitating to consider her movements, into the board chamber for a meeting.
The night before, she’d been darting around energetically at a United Way event, snapping photos and greeting friends.
Sujit Singh stood nearby filming Rettig’s every move, capturing the confusion that ensued. The footage will be part of a documentary the 29-year-old is filming, titled “Through My Eyes.” He hopes the film will help people understand what it’s like to live with a disability.
“We kind of want to gauge the natural reactions,” said Singh, associate director of operations for Access 2 Independence, a local nonprofit run by and for people with disabilities. “Yesterday she was her normal self and today she’s in a wheelchair. What happened? How do people react to her being disabled? That kind of brings it around to the original concept of how is disability viewed to the non-disabled public?”
Singh, who is working on the film with the help of about a dozen interns, hopes to finish it in time to be shown at Iowa City’s Landlocked Film Festival this fall, as well as at a handful of other festivals.
So far, the University of Iowa graduate has rounded up 13 volunteers, including several UI professors, who have agreed to spend time on camera — some for only a few hours and some for a full day — simulating a disability.
Joe Sulentic, a UI entrepreneurship professor, will be next to take on the challenge. In a few weeks, he’ll teach a class of unsuspecting students while various people whisper to him through a hidden earpiece, an activity designed to simulate schizophrenia. At the end of class, Sulentic will tell his students about the project.
“Then we’ll get the personal interaction, of ‘What were they thinking?’” Singh said. “If you had to go through the rest of the semester with Joe jumping in and jumping out, how would you be able to go through class that way?”
Sulentic said he expects it will be challenging to teach the class normally, but he’s happy to participate in a project that pushes the boundaries of a typical lecture.
“I think it’s fantastic when students show initiative outside of the classroom to improve their learning or make the world a more informed or a better place,” he said. “So I applaud him.”
Iowa City Councilor Jim Throgmorton also has agreed to participate, Singh said.
One of the volunteers will experience being mute and, in place of speaking, will select pictures on an iPad that will then “speak” for the person. Singh said he envisions him or her then going to a restaurant and observing the server’s reaction.
“They don’t see the person; they see the disability,” he said. “They talk to the person next to them, saying ‘OK what does he want?’ instead of talking to the person who has the disability.”
The idea for the project came from watching TV shows where skinny models put on fat suits to see if they were treated differently, Singh said.
“It got me to think, people look at size and how different races are treated, but no one’s ever looked at disability,” he said.
The project also was encouraged by Singh’s personal experience with disability. He’s lived with a form of epilepsy for 18 years, a struggle he said has made him more aware of the world around him.
“It’s kind of made me the person I am,” he said. “I have to take a bus instead of being able to drive. … It made me have to learn to be more independent to get things done because I have what I have. Having it made me have to learn more and do more and make myself more aware of what’s going on in the community in order to live life.”
At the end of Thursday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Rettig explained her wheelchair. Although she’s an avid cyclist, she said she suffers from meningitis and fibromyalgia, and pushing the wheelchair around was more difficult than she expected.
“I was already very sore,” she said. “I think this is going to be an interesting experience today.”
