The following is a guest post by filmmaker Shira Avni.
Congratulations to all! The world premiere of Tying Your Own Shoes was on Friday at 5pm here in Leipzig, Germany.
They put us in an ENORMOUS theatre – it seats about 800 and was maybe half to two-thirds full, with a massive screen! The film looked gorgeous and the music sounded great! Questions and many nice comments afterwards.
We were paired with a beautiful and moving feature documentary called October Country, which will be playing at RIDM (Montreal) so please check it out if you can. The pairing was really appropriate, emotionally and artistically. It turns out that one of the directors used to work at Creativity Explored, a visual arts centre for artists with special needs – quite an amazing coincidence!
We’ve had lots of interest in the film from other festival programmers – at least 3 European festivals approached me for screening copies of the film. There were several good questions during the Q&A. We have another screening tomorrow night at 10:15.
The most moving moment was when a man came up to me after the screening and said that his sister had just given birth to a baby with Down syndrome and was terrified about what the future held as she was only hearing the worst predictions from the medical community.
He was incredibly impressed with how articulate Ninah, Katherine, Matthew, and Petra are, and how profound their outlooks on life – he said that our film changed his view on Down syndrome and that it would give his sister enormous hope and support. I gave him a DVD of the film (and a copy of John and Michael too) and wished his sister and new baby well!
Thank you to everyone for your gorgeous work – Carrie for your beautiful editing, Luigi for the gorgeous music which uplifts the film, Fred for your wonderful and tireless digital work, Salim for your lovely and sensitive videography, Michael and David for believing in the project, the NFB Mediatheque with its phenomenal staff, and of course Ninah, Katherine, Matthew, and Petra , and their families…there are many more people to thank but I’ll stop here for now. It’s almost 3am – goodnight!
