Following the film and a short intermission, a panel discussion will address themes raised in our July-August film series. (We have borrowed the title "The Face of Our Fear" from an in-progress work by Neil Goldstein.) Participants in the panel will be Neil Goldstein, producer-director for film, television and radio, and Chair, East Coast Chapter of the Corporation on Disabilities and Telecommunication (CDT East); Stephen Dwoskin, filmmaker and author (see introduction, August 7); and Pamela Walker, video producer and performance artist (see introduction, August 5 matinee). The panel discussion will be sign-language interpreted. "Daniel Day-Lewis (is a) ferocious performer in My Left Foot, (the screen) adaptation of Irish writer Christy Brown's life story. The working title for his autobiography, jokes Christy in the movie, was 'Reminiscences of a Mental Defective.' Born with cerebral palsy, he was treated as a 'vegetable' and a 'poor unfortunate half-wit' until the day he took a piece of chalk between his toes and wrote the word mother on the floor. I wouldn't want to steer anyone away from a movie containing a scene (the one in the restaurant) that Pauline Kael says 'may be the most emotionally wrenching scene I've ever experienced in the movies,' but I was more interested in Day-Lewis' performance as the physically twisted, rage-choked, affection-starved Christy than I was emotionally caught up...Mrs. Brown (Brenda Ficker) is a gentle, courageous breeder. In real life she gave birth twenty-two times although only thirteen children survived. Here she is depicted as an exceptionally nurturing, ruddy-cheeked mother despite the family's grinding poverty...The boy Christy (played fiercely, too, by Hugh O'Conor) looks like he's bursting with words...(From) a spastic, drooling, largely helpless body, (the adult Brown) continues to fight against pity and avoidance. Day-Lewis' incarnation indicates that Christy Brown was wickedly funny and lusty--a typically and untypically tormented Irishman. The movie ends with his courtship of Mary (Ruth McCabe)...whom he married...Crisp and clean as Sheridan's first-time direction is, the screenplay turns the life into a series of highlights and lowlights...A highly unusual life becomes too much of a traditionally inspirational story." -- Georgia Brown, Village Voice