You’re listening to a Community Story from Be My Eyes. Hi, I’m Doug. I’m a social impact filmmaker in Los Angeles, and actually a lot of the work that I do as a filmmaker around accessibility is what led me to Be My Eyes. I’ve been a member of Be My Eyes now volunteering for I want to say like, seven, eight months maybe. The most memorable call I had was actually this past Thanksgiving. I was assisting a woman who was making her plate for her Thanksgiving meal. There was this table of all these different dishes and she wanted to make sure she got all her favorite things from the table. So we were talking our way through that but as we were talking about that, we started just talking about Thanksgiving and how it was such a unique thanksgiving happening during Covid, and we were talking about the past year. How there were family members that both of us couldn’t have at this Thanksgiving because we were separated by a distance and how much we missed our family members. It was just so great to end up connecting with this person on Thanksgiving and really one of the highlights of my Thanksgiving. She was such a sweet person, it was such a lift to my day that day because it was actually the first Thanksgiving that I had away from my parents and my brother. And it actually relates so much to the film that I’ve been working on for the past few years. It was actually inspired by an encounter I had with the first person who’s deafblind that I met, ten years ago on a New York City street corner, and kind of similar in that real-life encounter, I initially started helping this man Artemio get to a bus stop tha the needed to get home. But we ended up sitting and having a conversation for over an hour, with me tracing one letter in his palm , and he would write back in a notepad. And it was such a beautiful and intimate way of communicating that I had never felt before I felt like this guy had gone from being a stranger to a good friend of mine. And it inspired this film that I ended up making, partnering with Helen Keller services and the deafblind community to make, and actually cast for the first time ever in film history a deafblind actor in a lead role – and that’s been such an amazing experience that has actually led us to the Academy Awards this year. We’re actually a nominee for best live action short at this year’s Oscars! I’ll be going with Robert Tarango who’s our deafblind actor. He’s going to be only the second deafblind actor ever to attend the Oscars since Helen Keller herself, which is really exciting. My co-nominee is the CEO of Helen Keller services who I’ve worked with very closely over the last three years, and we’re just very honored to be able to bring thi story and the deafblind community to so many people who have never had a chance to learn about or hear from someone who’s deafblind. If you’re interested you can watch the film for free at FeelingThrough.com. We also have an audio descriptive version of the film there. And there’s also a free companion documentary that takes you behind the scenes of making the film, of the inspiration behind the film. And you can also find us on social media if you want to follow along the journey. And again I’m so happy that this film and all the topics around accessibility led me to Be My Eyes which is something that’s really been such an amazing thing to be a volunteer with. I’m looking forward to more calls in the future! Thank you for listening to this Community Story from Be My Eyes. You can share your story too. Send it to mystory@bemyeyes.com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, download our app, or visit bemyeyes.com/community-stories for more.