Lives of four blind teens fascinate documentary maker

A few years ago, filmmaker Keith Maitland attended a wedding in Austin. He was seated at a table with the best man, who was the head of recreation for the Austin-based Texas School for the Blind. The table conversation turned to the best man's job and the events he put on for the school.

"I realized very quickly that I had a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be a blind teen-ager and what blind people's experience was like," Maitland says. "Here's a community of teenagers that isn't really understood, if they're thought of at all."

One thing Maitland learned is that many people who are blind aren't born blind but had sight at one time. He began to become more curious about the lives of the teens at the school and how they adapted to sight loss while doing all the things that high-school students do.

That curiosity was the genesis of The Eyes of Me, Maitland's documentary about the school, which will air Tuesday night as part of the Independent Lens series on KERA/Channel 13.

The movie, which played at last year's AFI Film Festival, profiles four teens: Chas, an aspiring rapper who leaves the school's dorms and lives independently in an off-campus apartment; Denise, a shy young woman trying to come out of her shell; Isaac, who lost his sight only a year before the film was made and moves from his Paris, Texas, home to the Austin school; and Meagan, the school's valedictorian. (Chas is originally from Fort Worth, and Isaac moved to Fort Worth during filming.)

Maitland intersperses interviews with the students with footage of them participating in everyday school activities.

"[The school] has a school play, it has a track team and a wrestling team and cheerleaders," Maitland says. "All of the different elements of the high-school experience are touched upon at the school."

Maitland, who grew up in Plano and attended the University of Texas at Austin, was living in New York at the time he attended the Austin wedding. After his conversation with the Texas School for the Blind staffer, he went back to New York, where he found himself experimenting with his own sight and perception. He'd walk down streets asking himself what it would be like to lose his sight, even closing his eyes and seeing how many steps he could take without seeing where he was going. He felt compelled to find out what this was like from the point of view of people who live this way every day, and he returned to Austin to visit the school.

"The very first blind person I ever met in my entire life was Chas, who became the center point of the film," Maitland says. "Within two minutes of meeting him, I knew that I had to make a film about him in specifics, and about a community of blind teen-agers around him as well."

Chas' charisma and grit are evident in the film, as he struggles to pay rent and bills (and with roommates who don't hold up their end of the deal) while pursuing his hip-hop career. Maitland says that school is small -- there are only 150 students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and they come from all over Texas -- so he had a fairly small pool to work with when he decided to concentrate on the high-school-age students He chose to focus on the four principal characters because of the way they balanced out one another.

"[Denise] was basically the polar opposite of Chas," Maitland says. "She was a brand-new freshman who was so shy, almost painfully so, and she stood out in stark contrast to him.... The other two characters, Meagan and Isaac, as we got to know them more and more, we thought elements of their stories and personalities stood out in contrast to Chas and Denise."

One of the documentary's more unusual features is its occasional use of animation to illustrate the teens' emotions, ambitions and perception (the teens all had input into the animated sequences). Maitland also incorporates music from Austin-based acts such as American Analog Set and Golden Bear into the film's soundtrack. In a way, that echoes his past, when he shot videos of Dallas bands such as Tripping Daisy and Hagfish in Deep Ellum. But it also goes back to Linklater.

"I worked as an intern for Rick Linklater 12 years ago, and I was always impressed with the way that he built a community of collaborators in [Austin] to work with and rely on," Maitland says. "When I knew I was coming back to Austin from New York, that made me want to tap into the great talent here in town."

It's been nearly five years since Maitland began working on The Eyes of Me, and all four of its principals are now adults. Maitland has stayed in touch with them, saying that Chas continues to make music and Meagan is now a resident adviser at the School for the Blind. His background is in narrative film -- while in New York he worked on films by Woody Allen and Joel Schumacher -- but Maitland says he finds documentary-making to be equally appealing, and he has been approached by other disability groups about possible projects.

A line in Maitland's bio says he has an "interest in human perception," which leads to a question about whether The Eyes of Me could be followed by other films about the senses.

"It's not as concrete as that," Maitland says. "But it is where my interest in storytelling and connecting in other humans is borne out of -- concepts of perception and identity and how they interplay with each other. But it's not so much the physical senses I'm intrigued by. It's more about how you see yourself and the world around you and how you define yourself."

ROBERT PHILPOT, 817-390-7872