Love Land is a narrative dramatic feature film that follows Ivy, a young woman with a severe traumatic brain injury that affects her motor and cognitive skills, as she faces her refusal to be identified as a person with an intellectual disability. When she is placed in an institution for being a danger to herself and others, Ivy will stop at nothing to prove to the world, and to herself, that she... is “normal” enough to transcend the label of “Special.”
The film is a tragedy, documenting one community’s failure to transcend an age-old system of “segregating the Special.” Despite its ambivalent outcome, the tragedy of Love Land is offset by the hope of a better future marked by interdependence and self-determination for all.
Love Land is about the importance of diverse (and often risky) experiences to the fulfillment of the human condition. It's about refusing to accept the segregation of the world's largest minority, and about jump-starting a cultural discourse in America to help change perceptions of “pity and fear” to those of “equal citizenship” .
Love Land is a movie with nuanced, layered characters that reach beyond stereotypes, presenting characters with intellectual disabilities as complete and conflicted human beings—capable of good, evil, and grey—with far-reaching desires and vibrant, profound sexual identities; it is a movie that dares to say that social views – not individual bodies – are the real barriers for people with disabilities ; it says that “charitable interaction” is unacceptable, proclaiming full community inclusion as a civil right; and it puts its money where its mouth is by only casting professional actors with the actual disability labels portrayed by the characters in the film. Love Land further gains a great deal of creative integrity from its ties with the constituents of activist organizations and disability scholarship programs.
