For the past 26 years, about 22,000 blind and visually impaired schoolchildren from around the world have competed in the Braille Challenge: a literacy test against a loudly ticking clock. It has all the theater of a Model UN competition, all the stakes of a make-or-break standardized exam and young competitors from first grade through high school juggling their own expectations, ambitions and emotions – with a degree of difficulty that is surely unfathomable to most.
Brailled It is a new film that immerses viewers in the ups and downs of the 2024 edition of the Braille Challenge, which saw more than 1,100 students descend on the University of Southern California campus. But instead of Emmy-winning director David Grabias steering a phalanx of camera and sound operators through the scenes, as he has done for past documentary projects on climate change and immigration policy, he strapped cameras to the competitors and left them to their own devices. “Every documentary is a collaboration, and you’re giving agency to your participants,” he says. “But this was: you’re going to go off and make the film, and we’ll help put it together.”
It was more than a little bit nerve-racking for Grabias, abdicating control of a film to a bunch of kids who, again, cannot see. But in the end he found three who not only took to the assignment but proved to be rich protagonists in their own right: Salome Cummins, a Missouri high schooler with an acute perfectionist streak; Christopher Morgan, a sage Georgian bound for college; and Isaiah Gauthier, a winsome 10-year-old from Saskatchewan making history as the first student from the province to reach the finals. All three are credited as directors along with Grabias and close collaborator Brendon Schulze.
A competition film that shifts the burden of telling the story on to its participants certainly seems like a heaping responsibility to put on novice film-makers who are in it to win it. But in Morgan’s case, he let stress be his guide. “There’s obviously going to be some moments where it’s like: ‘Oh my goodness – I am experiencing a lot of stress right now!’” he says. “Because a lot of people, when they hear about Braille Challenge, they say: ‘Wait, what the heck is that?’”
On its face, the challenge will look familiar to anyone who’s sat for A-levels or the ACT: participants are divided into age categories, funneled into classrooms and tested on their reading and writing skills. But in place of the standard question booklet and Scantron sheet, students take their cues from running their fingers across reams of Braille-coded prompts and headphone audio directions and transmit their responses with special typewriters that emboss Braille characters on to paper.
The typewriters, called braillers, give the pressure-cooker environment the old-world feel of a postwar newspaper bullpen, with hands moving in a furious blur from one thing to the next as time ticks away. “Even some of the parents of the kids doing the Braille Challenge may not understand the full scope of what we do behind those barriers, the pure amount of focus it takes, the strain it might put on your fingers,” Morgan says. “When you’re reading for a long time, I wouldn’t say they start hurting, but they start to get tired.”
Brailled It is a remarkable window into the inner lives of the visually impaired. Sighted viewers may find themselves disoriented by the hour-and-a-bit doc initially. Image-driven opening scenes are explained with an audio-description track, the kind of thing you typically see as an option on streaming shows. Camera shots are composed from the perspectives of director-protagonists who can’t help their intense focus on so many torsos, elbows and knuckles.
Still, it only takes a few minutes to settle into the set-up and become immersed in the harsh world visually impaired people are forced to navigate every day. In one scene, the film follows Cummins as she makes the fraught journey from her eighth-floor hotel room down to the lobby – pawing for the space where the elevator bank should be, fingering the creases between the elevator doors time and again because she’s alone and clearly mindful of missing her chance to board. The scene ends with a familiar voice rescuing Cummins just as she bumps into a display sign on an easel with the Challenge schedule. In fact, that’s our introduction to her.
Most of the scenes in Brailled It unfold this way, in a single continuous take. The approach was not without risk: the student directors could have left Grabias and editor Edgar Sardarian searching for the plot in the cutting room. But the Challenge weekend supplied natural time constraints, while the competition itself supplied stakes. The characters did not have to manufacture a story; they only had to play their parts. Instead, something curious happened along the way: flashes of genuinely extraordinary film-making.
Like so much film and TV voiceover, the audio description in Brailled It takes a backseat once the narrative is off and running; you might forget the guide, essential for this crowd, if it didn’t boomerang around. (“Really, its primary purpose is to identify Salome, Chris and Isaiah,” Grabias says.) I came to Brailled It soon after watching Lady in the Lake and was shaken by the unintentional echoes. Just as that classic noir places the viewer in its protagonist’s perspective and occasionally catches director-star Robert Montgomery’s reflection, Brailled It puts us inside its characters’ perspectives and catches glimpses of them as they earnestly go about their lives. The most artistic shot in the film is captured as Morgan is on a post-exam lunchtime hunt with friends, their interlinked shadows cast on to a brick-paved sidewalk set against mobility canes and wary feet.
Cummins, on a quest for personal independence, supplies the tension in Brailled It, agitating over her performance (“I failed at Braille Challenge!” she cries at one point in the doc) and her family’s doting interventions away from the exam room. Gauthier, meanwhile, is the film’s big-hearted philosopher, holding a banquet table audience rapt with his delightful musings on the notoriety that has come from his standout Braille Challenge showings. “We were stunned by the footage that came back,” Grabias says. “The intimacy of some of those moments was so personal and profound.”
That’s not to say the film is all heavy. Morgan delivers the film’s funniest moment when he accidentally walks in on his disrobing mother – unaware until then that his camera was still rolling. (She is blurred on screen.) “I just remember for the whole year leading up to the screening, wondering, Are they gonna include that part?” Morgan says. “But then we watched for the first time, and it was there. I die laughing every time. It’s just such a funny memory. And, yes, she has definitely forgiven me.”
The thing that really comes across in Brailled It is its free-spiritedness – the notion of a pressure-cooker competition that might ordinarily be a den for the cutthroat instead providing a safe space for kids who have been marginalized or overlooked by the wider world. “It’s so annoying when people just know you as the blind kid,” Gauthier grumbles on screen.
But for at least one weekend a year, they get to laugh, play and learn in a setting where their disability is celebrated as a superpower. That makes the Braille Challenge more than a venue to promote youth literacy and wider accessibility, and Brailled It more than a bog-standard coming-of-age documentary. “A lot of times you hear people say, ‘We’re going to make memories that will last a lifetime,’” says Morgan, in his first semester at Georgetown and dialing in from his dorm room. “Really, this film has done that. I can literally go back and watch it 20, 30, 40 years from now and be like, I was 16 years old in 2024, and I did Braille Challenge. That’s just a very vivid memory that will just continue to live on.”
Brailled It is out now in select US cinemas with a UK date to be announced
