The 39th Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival begins Friday and runs through Sunday, Nov. 17, featuring more than 100 films and documentaries, including the inspiring tale of a Broward resident who became blind as an adult.
The film, Blind AF, directed by Gina LeVay and debuts Saturday, tells the story of Shawn Cheshire, a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea resident, who lost her sight at the age of 36 due to a traumatic brain injury.
Since then, she’s won multiple paralympic medals, climbed Mount Everest and rode across the United States on a solo bike. The story follows Cheshire as she makes her cross country bike trip and learns lessons that help her confront her trauma.
Cheshire said that the adjustment to losing her sight was tremendously difficult.
“It's a lot of loss. I feel like the experience of going from an independent sighted individual to now, living in darkness, dependent in many ways is such a significant sense of loss. Like it's catastrophic,” she said, “I feel like, since the injury, I'm just constantly trying to claw myself out of a black hole of sadness.”
The way she claws out of that hole is with sports. Chesire began training and eventually found her way onto the radar of Team USA’s paracycling team for the 2016 Olympics. She won multiple medals at those games. Since embracing athletics as an outlet, Cheshire says she doesnt recognize the person who she used to be.
“I don't know who she is,” she said, “ I remember her totally. I mean, I remember what it was like to live like her, which is motivation to make sure I live my life very different going forward.“
“I feel like everybody's got an opinion of what they think blind people should do, shouldn't do, can do, can't do, should look like, shouldn't look like, because that's all I hear,” she said. “Part of figuring out how to not feel so caged in by blindness was to figure out how to step out of that. Just change that mentality and just not care what other people think and say.”
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To complete her cross county ride on a solo bike, Cheshire rode with a team. Riders and the film crew wore helmets with two-way communication devices, and a lead bike had a speaker that would play music Cheshire could hear over the traffic. If it got too windy or too loud, a high pitched hornet whistle would direct her.
“Once I can't hear what direction to go, I don't know if I'm going straight,” she said, “So it was just critical that I always had some sort of audio point to follow.”
In addition, LeVay said that filming the ride presented its own unique challenges. There was never an opportunity to reshoot a scene, so the crew was meticulous in pre-planning.
“We really wanted to make this as cinematic and as beautiful as we could. And we knew that we only had, you know, maybe a minute or 10 seconds sometimes to get the shot,” said LeVay. “And sometimes we didn't do it. But then the good thing is we had 3,600 miles to try it again somewhere.”
Cheshire isn’t slowing down anytime soon. She has just completed a solo hike, 23-miles from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to the south rim with no guide. She says she’ll always find a way to push the limits and show that blind people are far more capable that they are often given credit for.
“My dream job is having a show of my own where it's like Shawn's blind adventures,” she said, “I take people out like Chris Hemsworth and I say, ‘Okay, buddy, let's have a real adventure, Shawn style.’”
Read more about the film festival schedule, venues and tickets here.
IF YOU GO
EVENT: Debut of film Blind AF during FLIF
WHEN: 1 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 9.
WHERE: Gateway Cinema, 1820 E Sunrise Blvd, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 33304
NOTE: After the screening, both LeVay and Cheshire will answer questions from the audience.
