This year’s OTR Film Festival seeks to inspire people through films based on disability

The Over-The-Rhine Film Festival this weekend will feature films with actors and actresses with disabilities or films that were created by people with disabilities.

The annual festival, which is in its fourth year, is presented by LADD, and will run from Thursday to Sunday. This year’s theme is “See the Story, Be the Story.”

“The notion means that people have the opportunity to come to the festival, see this wide variety of films and narratives that we’re going to be presenting over the course of the four days and, hopefully, find some reflection of themselves and their experiences up on the screen,” TT Stern-Enzi, the festival’s artistic director, says. “Have the opportunity to either talk to filmmakers or other audience members that came to the screening as well, and then, really walk away charged and emboldened to go out into the world and take what they’ve learned and what they’ve seen and apply it to their lives.”

Attendees will have the opportunity to see 50 films and a concert by I Don’t Konform, as well as participate in morning breakfasts with Stern-Enzi, and opening and closing night parties. The Over-The-Rhine Film Festival received more than 100 entries to be considered for screening.

There also will be opportunities to talk with people involved with the films. For example, one of the films that will be shown is Cha Cha Real Smooth, a movie that is currently on Apple TV+. Vanessa Burghardt, who plays Lola, will be at the festival for a Q&A after the screening.

OTR Film Festival films will be screened at the Art Academy of Cincinnati’s SITE 1212, the Woodward Theater, Harriet Beecher Stowe House and the National Underground Railroad and Freedom Center throughout the four-day event.

LADD, founded as Living Arrangements for the Developmentally Disabled Inc., has been serving Greater Cincinnati since 1975.