FOR ALL THE BRILLIANT CONVERSATIONS
A film about friendship, healing and navigating trauma.
“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” ― Audre Lorde
"Intending to portray a social issue and discrimination, Shiilā Seok Wun Au Yong starts to film a friend with a disability, Faith Njahîra Wangarî. Under pressure from Seok to reenact how she navigates an inaccessible environment, Faith asks Seok to face her own ableism in prioritizing the film over Faith’s physical safety. The film project, which sprang from the filmmaker’s belief in the power of storytelling, rather unexpectedly captures the power relations and violence involved in telling stories. As each feels powerless and betrayed, tensions arise that cast a shadow over their friendship and jeopardize the completion of the film. What they end up creating together is a vivid and intimate depiction of emotionally charged negotiations and unavoidable interruptions in their journey to understand each other. 'For All the Brilliant Conversations' is an uncompromising and brilliant illustration of the microcosm of power dynamics enmeshed with histories of trauma, marginalized racial and sexual identities, and embodiment. Intense and honest yet humorous and familiar, their conversations are how they practice their love for each other, even when those conversations are inevitably constricted by the grammar of ableism. The film shows that undoing able-bodied privilege, as well as understanding the access needs of others or articulating one’s own, is not a work of magic; rather it is a repeated process of painful struggles that defies dramatic transformation and also brings tender moments."
― Eunjung Kim, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies, Syracuse University
"At times intense because of the rawness of the conflict between the two protagonists, Faith Njahîra Wangarî and Shiilā Seok Wun Au Yong, For All the Brilliant Conversations illustrates how intimacy is often hard fought, and incomplete. Negotiating expectations, Faith and Seok set out to tell a story about ableism and the need for connections across different embodiments and subjectivities. The film becomes less of a statement on the need to think (and act) expansively about disability in an ableist society, but more about the limits of film to accurately document pain and misunderstanding when outcome is emphasized over process. There are no "ableist assholes" here, just two friends deeply committed to each other trying to endure a filmmaking process that appears to leave deep scars."
― Michael Gill, Associate Professor of Disability Studies in Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University
"Thank you for this film, which immerses the viewer in the emotion & day-to-day logistics of interdependent creativity & consciousness. It challenges ableist assumptions & leaves us renewed for the "violence" of grafting community despite differences, so that those of us who identify as nondisabled can grow thick skin and get over our defensiveness in order to be in relationship to disabled others. Thank you Seok & Faith for this brilliant film."
― Rebecca Garden, Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, SUNY Upstate Medical University
 |  |  |
|---|---|---|
 |
FILM SCREENING
Please contact us for private screenings and facilitations.
HEALING
“By creating a new mythos - that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave - la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject/object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa
“Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.”