My Beautiful Stutter Review: Speaking Truth to Power nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Say, a non-profit founded by Taro Alexander in 2001, offers a soothing rebuttal to the campers’ internalized derision: you are enough. Your speech is beautiful. Take as long as you need. It’s a belief and normalization difficult to imagine as a child bullied for her stutter, said Julianna Padilla, 23, a former camper and now counselor. Now she can say confidently: “We’re not that much different,” she told the Guardian. “We’re like normal, average people, we just take a little longer to speak. We know exactly what we want to say, it just takes a little bit longer.”
Padilla is one of several youths from across the country featured in My Beautiful Stutter, directed by Ryan Gielen and executive produced by Paul Rudd and Mariska Hargitay, which follows campers and their families as they grow into Say’s mantra of self-acceptance. Some, such as Padilla and fellow high schoolers Emily and Sarah, reflect candidly on past pain and their journey toward embracing their stutter
“My Beautiful Stutter” – No hesitation [MOVIE REVIEW]
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Taro Alexander at Camp Say in “My Beautiful Stutter.” Photo courtesy of Passion River Films.
“My Beautiful Stutter,” the elegantly profound documentary directed by Ryan Gielen and written by Steve Sander, will open your eyes to this affliction. There are almost 70 million stutterers in the world, more than 3 million in the U.S. It affects one in twenty children. Many stutterers undergo speech therapy in hopes of finding the key to fluency. There is no key; there are no tricks of the trade. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Some stutterers “outgrow” this affliction. Many famous people have “overcome” stuttering. President Biden is an example but so are Marilyn Monroe, Samuel L. Jackson, and Astros World Series MVP George Springer. Winston Churchill stuttered as did James Earl Jones.