Benjamin Kling’s Interior Cinema

Benjamin Kling is an audio describer. He translates movies for blind and visually impaired viewers. After more than a hundred audio described films and series and while working on Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, he feels the need to question his practice: is he too objective? Does he do justice to the films in all their diversity, in all their art, in the craft of the director? To answer these questions, he decides to meet blind and visually impaired people from different backgrounds. He wants to learn more about their singular way of “watching” films (they insist on saying “watching a movie”) and their expectations about audio description. What can we learn, us as sighted persons, from their way of experiencing cinema?