Experiencing films beyond the screen

The festival featured the barrier-free version of Hello Mr Billionaire, a comedy loosely based on the 1985 Richard Pryor film, Brewster's Millions.

It was the first film that Li Yiying had provided a barrier-free version. She says she still has a vivid memory of how every detail, from wording to conveying emotion, was edited and revised.

She spent more than a week writing the narrative script, and another two weeks proofreading and perfecting it.

"I got an experienced tutor, who guided me through the work on the text. The most common question he raised was, 'Can a blind person understand this?'" Li says, adding that the question is the most basic — yet often also the most challenging — requirement for a barrier-free film.

She was, for instance, stumped by how to describe a scene in which the protagonist takes a bundle of money out from a safe to support the speech of a hypocritical writer.

"At first, I suggested describing the stack of bills to be 'as high as a forearm is long', but my colleague rejected that, saying it's not a commonly used term," Li recalls.

"In the end, we estimated the amount was about 200,000 yuan ($28,000), so we used that number."

There were many such discussions on selecting the proper wording for the scripts, she says.

After the script was done, they needed to record, edit and mix the audio. If there were any problems, they had to start from scratch — "five times", she recalls, clearly.

"The script contains 28,700 characters, and numerous pauses and stops. It's my dream to make films accessible to people with vision loss," Li says.