home Resources and Services Libraries Buy Deej Performance Rights for the 2019 Celebrate Ability Week

Libraries Buy Deej Performance Rights for the 2019 Celebrate Ability Week

This week is the annual Celebrate Ability Week on campus during which special events are planned celebrating disability awareness and culture at Mizzou. This is the fourth year the University Libraries have purchased a film and the public performance rights and partnered with the Disability Center to show a movie depicting a person with a disability.

The movie this year, Deej, is a Peabody award-winning documentary and listed on the American Library Association Film and Media Round Table 2019 list of Notable Videos for Adults.  DJ (Deej) Savarese, is a non-speaking young man with autism. Abandoned by his birth parents and presumed incompetent, Deej found not only a loving family but also a life in words, which he types on a text-to-voice synthesizer. As he makes his way through high school and begins his journey at Oberlin College, he confronts the terrors of his past, society’s obstacles to inclusion, and the sometimes paralyzing beauty of his own senses.

In his advocacy on behalf of other nonspeaking autistics, he embraces filmmaking and poetry, and discovers what having a voice can truly mean.

Deej, (2017, dir. Robert Rooy) is 72 minutes and will be shown Wednesday, Oct 2nd, 8:00 pm in Memorial Union, Jesse Wrench Auditorium

Watch trailer.

home Events and Exhibits University Libraries and Disability Center Host Screening of Unrest

University Libraries and Disability Center Host Screening of Unrest

For the third year in a row, the University Libraries have partnered with the Disability Center to host a movie screening during Celebrate Ability Week, (October 1-5) – the week-long series of events which celebrates disability awareness and culture at Mizzou. The Libraries purchased the film and performing rights for Unrest — a Sundance award-winning documentary depicting 28-year-old Jennifer Brea, a Harvard Ph.D. student just months away from getting married, who develops a mysterious fever that leaves her bedridden. Brea begins to chronicle her illness with a camera and creates this “eloquent personal documentary.”  The film will be screened on Wednesday, October 3rd, from 8:00 – 10:30pm in the MU Student Center at The Shack eating area.  Watch the Unrest trailer or check out the DVD after next week.