When Access Shapes the Story

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MOVIE REVIEWS
Brailled It
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Genre: Documentary
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 13m
Director(s): Salome Cummins, Isaiah Gauthier, David Grabias, Christopher Morgan, Brendon Schulze
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: What if a documentary stopped asking how it should show the subjects of the film, but rather how those subjects wish to be seen? While BRAILLED IT doesn’t explicitly ask this question, it’s built around the answer. We leave behind the premises of conventional documentary expectations the moment this film begins, giving cameras to blind and low-vision kids competing in the annual Braille Challenge. The filmmakers make a discreet yet strong choice against translating experience into sight for sighted viewers and instead invite the audience to come to the experience itself, to where it exists.

It’s that decision that first places BRAILLED IT outside the usual framing most documentaries make use of when working in the space of disability, competition, or even accomplishment. There’s no setup here that brings these kids in as objects of inspiration; no contrived narrative that’s been created to reassure audiences that hardship always ends with victory. Instead, the film opts to exist in the flow of a weekend where literacy is a skill, a point of pride, a source of anxiety, and an asset to the competitors. Here, blindness doesn’t define these children; preparation, rivalry, confidence, aggravation, and the combination of excitement and panic that comes from being assessed for something so important to them.

BRAILLED IT's most extraordinary quality is its unwavering determination not to enhance or rectify the disorientation resulting from the film’s production method. Shots wander, frames clip faces, moments misorient. Instead of apologizing for this, the film owns it. Sound becomes the dominant organizing principle. Voice, ambient sound, and overlapping dialogue audio do far more heavy lifting for the storytelling than any establishing shot. For sighted audiences, that creates a persistent but subtle recalibration: You are no longer seeing in the way you’re accustomed to seeing. You are hearing for meaning.

BRAILLED IT is both demanding and empowering. At this level, the film doesn’t make the kids more comfortable for the audience. It actually asks the audience to change. It asks them to shift. And in that respect, it is an inversion that feels radical yet somehow obvious.

At its core, it’s the children's empathy and emotional honesty that really hold your hand throughout the film. Their footage is funny, competitive, exposed, and disarmingly candid. We witness friendships established in half-spoken sentences, rivalries honed in rehearsals, and quiet crises of confidence that go unexplained. The film doesn’t pause to highlight these moments, and, like all of its other decisions, it earns that trust, especially in the more subdued moments when the competition recedes to reveal the relief of being around others who understand you without the need to explain.

Allowing the kids to do their own documentation sidesteps another traditional pitfall of documentaries about children and adolescents: adults don’t appear as the focal point of the frame; instead, they serve as interpreters or emotional mediators. The participants are in charge. When adults do appear, they usually appear in the background, in the role of facilitators rather than narrators. There’s a case to be made that locking down the narrative too tightly would counteract the sense of freedom and authenticity that makes the film so successful. It’s a fine balance, and the filmmakers default towards lived experience over refinement.

It never frames literacy as a metaphor or moral. Braille is not a stand-in for something else or an idea. It’s functional, practical, and competitive, as well as an intensely personal act. It matters because having it allows you access to the language, to your own agency and self-possession. The urgency is just as focused on the individual stories as the entire competition. Salome Cummins, Isaiah Gathier, and Christopher Morgan's stories are its core, and telling them from their perspective is everything here.

Beyond its innovation, BRAILLED IT stands out as a film with a genuinely unmistakable mission. Its access isn’t present for the sake of presence, or as an accessory or a bullet point. Instead, they are authentically embedded in the viewing experience. This is access as authorship, not access as accommodation.

And as the competition draws to a close, the film avoids the temptation to give the victors false catharsis. What remains is a feeling of solidarity and self-realization. These kids are not walking away from this experience as conquerors or losers. They are walking away as validated. That difference is important. While there are winners and losers in the competition, being there is the true victory.

Instead of merely reporting on an event, BRAILLED IT calls into question the documentary form's presumptions about who holds the perspective and who should adjust. The result is one of the more subtly radical films of the year, one that earns its power through trust rather than spectacle. This is a film that knows exactly why it exists and never loses why that matters.

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[photo courtesy of ARTIFACT STUDIOS]

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