MANILA, Philippines—Lauro Purcil Jr., who has been blind for 49 years, said it was “a dream come true” to experience the full-length film “Hugo” with other visually impaired, deaf and hard-of-hearing participants during a special screening on Friday.
Eugenio “Toto” Villareal. FILE PHOTO
Purcil, who lost his eyesight in an accident during a basketball game when he was 13, said he first saw the Martin Scorsese film with his nephews and nieces a few years back.
“The kids were kind enough to explain to me what was happening in the film. I didn’t really want to disturb their viewing,” he said.
At SM City North Edsa on Friday, Purcil had a better appreciation of the film.
The 2011 historical drama by Martin Scorsese and three other movies with audio description and subtitle features were shown simultaneously in four cities across the country.
The special screening provided short verbal descriptions of the action and key visual scenes to add context to the films without disturbing their flow. The descriptions were inserted during pauses between dialogues.
Screened were: “Hugo” at SM City North Edsa in Quezon City; Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” in Baguio City; Tom Hooper’s “Les Misérables,” in Davao City; and Olivier Megaton’s “Taken 2,” in Iloilo City.
The venture was made possible after the CALL Foundation for the Blind, which Purcil heads, and DeafBlind Support Philippines signed a memorandum of understanding with the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) and the SM Cinema Group.
Purcil said he first experienced a movie with audio descriptions in the United States when he went to the screening of the Oscar-winning film “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998.
Amazing experience
“I was offered a headset. It was an amazing experience. Since then I became active in promoting the rights of the blind,” said Purcil, who is lead convenor of the Philippine Coalition on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and a member of the Steering Council of the Asean Disability Forum.
Purcil said he would accompany his wife whenever she watched movies, but he would end up sleeping “because I didn’t want to disturb her. I didn’t want to burden her with having to tell me what was happening.”
MTRCB Chair Eugenio Villareal, in his welcome address at the screening, said the board “shall proceed to study providing incentives, within the context of its mandate, to theaters which shall permanently provide closed captioning and descriptive audio.”
He said the MTRCB shall consider “the appointment of more persons with disabilities (PWDs) as local regulatory council volunteers or as deputies” and cooperate with the groups concerned “for informational campaigns for PWD-friendly and sensitive entertainment and media.”
Villareal said his office also aimed to “strengthen the PWD component of the board’s ‘Matalinong Panonood nina Juan at Juana’ seminars, workshops and learning modules.”