From
The Toronto Star:
It’s pretty simple, getting a cup of coffee in a café: You choose, you ask, you drink.
Unless you’re an autistic person, like
Carly Fleischmann, an 18-year-old Toronto student who is non-verbal.
Her world is filled
with all sorts of audio input competing for her attention, along with
sights and smells — filtering all this and making her wishes known to
even family members can be a herculean task. So getting a cup of coffee
is not always so simple.
To give a glimpse into
Carly’s everyday world, and to show how something so simple for most of
us can be so difficult for someone with autism, Carly’s father, Arthur
Fleischmann and his Toronto ad company, John St., produced a video, in
collaboration and with direct input from Carly — who communicates with
her iPad and other technological devices — called
Carly’s Café, and posted it on YouTube as well as the website,
www.carlyscafe.com.
The latter includes some footage from family home movies and starts
with a poignant quote from Carly: “Autism has locked me inside a body I
cannot control.”
The
two-minute 19-second video just won the Silver Lion award in the cyber,
public service category at Cannes Lions International Festival of
Creativity, held in France. The annual event showcases and judges
creativity in communications with 34,000 entrants this year from around
the world submitting to various categories.
Last fall, Carly’s
Café was used by the president of Poland to open his presentation at the
UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.
Filmed in one day on a
low budget of $7,500 at a downtown coffee shop, it features actors
playing a father-type figure, a sister and someone with autism. Carly
herself appears in the video. There’s also an interactive aspect.
“Through multiple
embedded ‘zones’ people can move their mouse around the screen and feel
the visual and auditory distraction that most of us could easily block
out but which becomes an engulfing hindrance for people like Carly,”
says Arthur Fleischmann.
In Carly’s case, when all this distraction is coupled with a lack of speech, “the frustration skyrockets,” he says.
On her
Facebook page,
where she has 97,000 followers, and where she posts regularly with her
iPad, Carly wrote: “Oh my Gosh! Silver Silver Silver. TAKE THAT Ashton
Kutcher!”
The video ties in with a 2012 book, Carly’s Voice, Breaking Through Autism,
written by Arthur, with a chapter by Carly. Arthur was quite taken by
Carly writing about how someone with autism can struggle with something
as simple as having a conversation in a coffee shop.
It’s been a long road
of discovery and achievement for Carly, who was diagnosed with autism at
the age of 2. At the time, no one realized the great potential locked
inside the child who could not speak.
But Carly, who had
intensive behavioural and communication therapy throughout her
childhood, surprised everyone by typing some words at age 10, to
indicate a problem she was having at the time. That incredible
breakthrough was just the start. She would go on to communicate
eloquently with various technological devices, becoming adept at
Facebook, Twitter, appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Larry King Live and others, to communicate about autism.
This fall, Carly is
going to the University of Toronto, having enrolled in Victoria
College’s Bachelor of Arts program which has a strong literary
tradition. She wants to be a journalist. Carly’s mother, Tammy Starr,
says U of T has gone out of its way to partner with us “to make this
work.”
University will be yet
another milestone for Carly who has long surpassed the low expectations
doctors had long ago given to her parents — that she would never
develop intellectually beyond the mental age of a small child.
