This Saturday, the longest running disability film festival in the world begins. Whether online or in person, you’re sure to see diverse, unabashed and engaging cinema.

In the two decades of Pushing Limits, we’ve watched the ethos of disability organizing from the 1970s be embraced by a new generation of disabled cultural workers and organizations. Superfest’s parent, the Longmore Institute at S.F. State, with its new disability cultural center is one keeper of these flames.

Our guest this week, Dr. Emily Beitiks, interim director for the Longmore Institute, has seen these happy developments close and personal. Eddie Ytuarte hosts.

SUPERFEST

Superfest Disability Film Festival is coming October 17-20, and whether you are joining in person in the Bay Area or online anywhere in the world, you need to be a part of it! Superfest is the longest running disability film festival in the world. Since 1970, it has celebrated cinema that portrays disability through a diverse, unabashed and engaging lens, and we can’t wait to come together as a community to take in this much-loved disability cultural event for its 38th festival, hybrid for the second year, with new levels of access.

EMILY BEITIKS:

Emily Beitiks received a Ph.D. in American Studies with a focus in Disability Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has served as adjunct faculty at five universities, centering disability studies in her curriculum.

From 2012 to the present, she has worked at the Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, serving as Interim Director for three years. While there, she developed her praxis as a scholar-activist of disability to promote creative forms of access for the arts and generate spaces that promote disability culture, serving as project director for a touring exhibition “Patient No More,” and serving as co-director of Superfest Disability Film Festival.

She exists in this world because her mother’s sudden disability diagnosis prompted her to have a child, and her first-hand experiences of disability have grown throughout her 20 years of experience working in the disability community.

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