THEm of the most moving scenes in My Beautiful Stutter, a documentary now broadcast on Discovery +, involves only a microphone and an open stage. Many of the participants at Camp Say in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a haven for stuttering youth promoted by the New York organization Stuttering Association for the Young, grew up feeling broken or confused, ostracized by a neurological disorder that disrupts the flow fluent speech. Some campers recite poetry, others speak only their names before falling into tears, all provided the space to speak rarely given in a world without stuttering (which can take a minute for a non-stutterer to read or say can take a person who stutters 10 times more). Tears abound; the scene buzzes with the bottomless human desire, felt most acutely in adolescence, to be seen, heard, loved, accepted.
Say, a nonprofit organization founded by Taro Alexander in 2001, offers a calming retort to the campers’ internalized scorn: you are enough. Your speech is beautiful. Take as much time as you need. It is a belief and normalization that is difficult to imagine as a child who is bullied by his stuttering, said Julianna Padilla, 23, a former camper and now a counselor. Now she can safely say: “We are not very different,” she told the Guardian. “We are like normal, normal people, it just takes us a little longer to talk. We know exactly what we mean, it just takes a little more time. “
Padilla is one of several young people from around the country who appear in My Beautiful Stutter, directed by Ryan Gielen and executive producer Paul Rudd and Mariska Hargitay, who accompanies campers and their families as they grow up on Say’s self-acceptance mantra . Some, like Padilla and other high school students Emily and Sarah, frankly reflect on the pain of the past and their journey to embrace stuttering: Emily remembers school days for fear of saying her own name; Sarah, a talking machine, is a long way from the captured girl, in a heart-breaking home video, changing awkwardly in silence while her colleagues sing together. Others, like Malcolm, nine at the time of filming, are shy and lonely, struggling with feelings of unworthiness and falling behind at school.
Almost everyone has a history of cruel bullying as a child, which solidified their sense of being different, broken. It doesn’t always come from other children – Padilla, who started attending Say workshops in New York City at the age of seven, remembers an elementary school teacher who made fun of her when she stuttered while reading a book aloud. Assuming she was trying to be funny or disrupt the class, the teacher banished her to the hall. Frustrated and confused, she started to talk less and less. “I didn’t want to talk to anyone, just to mask the fact that I stuttered,” said Padilla. “I just remember being so, so sad and being so tired of anything that involves my speech.”
Stuttering is a neurological disorder in speech production that affects about 70 million people, or about one in 20 children, almost twice as many boys as girls. It usually occurs between two and four years of age, and although some children grow up, the chances of losing the stutter entirely decrease each year. Many will face intimidation, stigmatization and daily indignities ranging from assumptions of incompetence to layoffs or impatient interruptions. Some develop tricks or tics to prevent or mask stuttering, like actor James Earl Jones and Joe Biden, but the psychological impacts of ostracism and childhood silence can last a lifetime.
There are also few representations of stuttering in popular culture. In addition to the 2010 Oscar-winning film, The King’s Speech, which portrayed King George VI fighting his stutter to address his countrymen in World War II, most stuttering depictions tend to joke or mockery. Padilla remembers being confused by the cartoon Porky Pig as a child – “that hilarious character who just couldn’t say a word”. There is Adam Sandler teasing a fellow stutterer with “Ttt-today Junior!” on Billy Madison, and the common joke on social media “Did I stutter?” to add emphasis to an untapped point.
“There aren’t many media outlets that young people can turn to to say OK, I’m not crazy, in fact I’m fine. It’s the world around me that’s broken, not me, ”said Gielen, the film’s director. “I wanted to go out and create this.”
Gielen started filming in 2015 after attending the annual Say gala in New York with Michael Alden, a co-producer for My Beautiful Stutter who produced the Broadway adaptation of The King’s Speech. At the time, Gielen believed he didn’t know anyone who stuttered. “I spent 35 years believing that I had never met anyone who stuttered,” he said. “And what I found out about making the film was that it probably was, but I either talked about them, or ignored them, or did something else passively to make their lives a little more difficult, to be a little less open to them.”
At the gala event, Gielen heard directly from young people who stuttered about bullying and marginalization, experienced “thunder, a kind of life-changing moment” when witnessing a child speaking and receiving crucial and palpable validation instead of mockery. He left the gala excited, “outraged that young people from all over the country are dealing with these mistreatments, simply because the way they speak is a little different from mine”.
He started filming Say events in New York, then filmed at the program camp in North Carolina, where he met children and their families before deciding on the five in a row, a diverse group in age, race, geography, socioeconomic status and family situation. “It was very, very important that, if you are a young man who hears, ‘Wait a second, did they make a film about children like me?’ That when you call, you can see yourself, ”he said.
The project started in 2015 and lasted for six years – two for filming, two for editing, two on festival circuits and in the distribution limbo. “Part of the challenge was finding enough money every few months,” said Gielen. “I think it shows people’s lack of awareness about the psychosocial impacts of being a child who stutters. People didn’t really understand how urgent a film or media like this is.
“The math is very simple: conscience equals empathy,” he added. “And there is simply no such awareness.”
My Beautiful Stutter traces the impact of this awareness – learning that you are not the only child who stutters, meeting people like you – on young people who stutter unaccustomed to being heard or having space. Malcolm, partner of a college camper named Will, passes his eyes down to play with other campers. Say’s goal, campers attest, is to successfully dissociate speech fluency and normalize stuttered speech.
The difference, said Padilla, was “a complete 180” of feeling that people were “trying to heal me from it instead of helping me with the pain and all the struggles I was facing”, for an increase in self-esteem, and even , at the end of high school, giving a speech to the whole school.
“I hope people will empathize with that [film]Said Padilla. “And if there is someone out there who made fun of someone who stutters, I hope this film will change your heart.”