Educational Media Reviews Online

Noted filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein has created a complicated, yet accessible film in Shameless: The Art of Disability. Showcasing the disability arts movement primarily in Canada, Klein explores the lives of five artists and their work through intimate conversations, interviews, and their art.

Klein achieves something insightful in bringing together these talented artists who obviously love their craft, and love the camaraderie which is created not only by their art but by their disability. The portraits she has painted on film are primarily those of artists, not disabled people. She has captured the strong rays of creativity shining from their souls. At the same time, Shameless is about living with a disability and standing up to society’s typecast images of the disabled.

The artists, all practicing in different modalities (filmmaking, painting, writing, choreography, acting), are all very unique people with differing personalities. By bringing them all together to focus on their art and exposing their deeply personal stories, Klein deftly creates a balanced view of the total person, not one defining characteristic.

As wonderful as the film is, the running time is a little long for classroom use, and an educational version would benefit from tighter editing in places where some of the dialog tends to drag. Recommended for academic library collections in disability studies, rehabilitation, art, women’s studies, activism and sociology.