SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! An immersive, first-person shoot, David Grabias’ Brailled It! is an intense and unique documentary film experience. Filmed by participants at the 2024 Braille Challenge Finals Weekend, Brailled It! directly follows the perspectives of three youths: Salome, Chris, and Isaiah. The process of shooting this film is innovative and challenging for the viewer to follow. Salome, Christopher, and Isaiah volunteered to strap a camera to their respective chests. This filming process both permits the spectator to see the three participants’ direct perspective and induces motion sickness. Gentle Reader, be advised: This film will make even the most cast-iron constitution queasy.
Brailled It! relies heavily on the kids being themselves. Fortunately for us, the three kids we follow are charming people. You actually want to follow their adventures over the 48 hours of the Braille Challenge Finals. Each of these kids is a strong personality and a competitor. Christopher is by far and away the most outgoing of the three kids. A boy from Suburban Atlanta, we learn that Christopher is looking forward to starting college in the fall. Accompanied by his mother, Christopher goes out of his way to meet and interact with as many other people as possible.
Isaiah is from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the largest city in that province. I especially enjoyed following Isaiah. While he’s not as outgoing as Chris, his interests make him most delightful. Isaiah is a gearhead. He, amongst the participants we track, is most excited by the technologies available to assist the blind and low-sighted kids of the Braille Challenge. As he will mention around the halfway mark of Brailled It!, Isaiah hopes for a camera that requires the blind to film with controls in Braille.
“Filmed by participants at the 2024 Braille Challenge Finals Weekend…”
Salome, on the other hand, is a type A personality. Of the three, she is perhaps the most introverted. She has a friend, Jane. There’s a cute scene where Jane, Salome, and their families enjoy ice cream sandwiches. Salome, as she will tell us repeatedly, and with great conviction,n is at the Braille Challenge to conquer. She has a nemesis, Leo. While we do not see her interact with Leo much, we do know she aims to perform better than him. Witnessing Salome beat herself up after the Brailler challenge is one of the most human moments we experience in Brailled It!
The use of the GoPro cameras for Braille It! is inspired. Even for the sighted, the GoPro is one of the most intuitive digital video cameras to use. The frame rate for the cinema mode is crisp. To my thinking, the crispness of the image offsets the often disjointed and dislocating feeling a spectator of Brailled It! experiences. Among the challenges this film tracks is the use of a Brailler. The Brailler is a word processor for Braille. From what I could tell of the shaky cam, gentle reader, the Brailler has between 8 and 10 keys. It seems the letters, maybe words, processed in Braille require certain formations of finger placement to properly word process in Braille. Which makes sense. A Blind person reads with their fingers. So, instead of the traditional Alphabet, a Brailler seems to turn all the letters into tactile formations for the digits.
Brailled It! would be intensely challenging to follow if Grabias did not provide a narrator. Meredith provides contextual descriptions of the imagery we see in Brailled It! As a Visual Description narrator, Meredith nails it. Her matter-of-fact tone makes Brailled It! a worthwhile experiment to watch.
An emotional roller coaster, Brailled It! is a most absorbing documentary. Perhaps the most direct of direct documentary experiences, this film definitely deserves to be included in an upcoming season of PBS’s Independent Lens. This documentary demands to be seen. Although I strongly recommend eating nothing before or during the viewing of Brailled It! Your body will thank you.
Brailled It! screened at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival
"…a most absorbing documentary"
