By Alise Chaffins
For the Dominion Post
Loren Goldfarb likes to shoot pool, which is how he became interested in Chad McDaniel’s story.
“I saw (Chad) at a regional event in Orlando. I had time in between matches, and I saw that he was about to start playing. I thought, ‘Oh, this is a great opportunity for me to watch him and get a sense of how he’s able to play.’ And I was really just amazed. I mean, he thoroughly destroyed his opponent. And it was like poetry in motion watching him wheel around the table and play. I was just so amazed. And we, turns out we had a mutual friend who put us in touch,” Goldfarb explained.
From there, Goldfarb decided to make Chad the subject of his documentary, “96 Pounds of Dynamite.” While the film follows Chad as he heads to a pool tournament in Las Vegas, it also explores the challenges he faces as someone with Osteogenesis Imperfecta. The documentary is a lovely look at how one navigates their disability and how they invite others to help them on that journey.
One way that Chad gets through life is with his wife, Allison. While she isn’t in the film much, viewers get a sense of their relationship through it.
“They have a beautiful relationship. A very mutually supportive relationship,” Goldfarb said. “Chad is front and center. He’s Mr. Personality. He’s the one who has this huge smile on his face all the time. And Alison has a great personality too, but she’s a little quieter, more subdued. They’re yin and yang a little bit when it comes to their personalities.”
In one scene, Chad leaves his home in Florida to visit his mother and stepfather in Mississippi. While there, he visits the school he attended growing up, and it highlights some of the challenges people with disabilities have faced.
Goldfarb shared, “I didn’t set out to make an issue film, but I think it’s important to try to give people some context and some information, and inform them a little more about the world around them. So it was important to weave in the context in which Chad fought this battle for his own independence when he was growing up. If this was happening right around the time that disability rights and education were becoming a serious issue, and there was some progress being made. But that progress that was being made was a little too late for Chad, because he was growing up right around the time that these fights were happening in Congress.”
Sometimes movies that focus on people with disabilities can be more about drumming up pity for the subject than showing them as full people. “96 Pounds of Dynamite” avoids that, allowing us to see Chad as more than his disability.
“I had never worked on a project involving someone with a disability as a main subject, and so I just went and produced the film and directed the film without really giving much thought to any of this,” Goldfarb said. “We have an expert in the film who talks about disability rights, Barry Whaley, from the Southeast ADA Center, and he does a terrific job. And as I started researching him and that world, I then became aware of some of these issues, and I did end up, during the rough cut process, bringing on a consultant, a woman with a disability, to review the rough cut and give me some feedback.”
“96 Pounds of Dynamite” will be available on Apple and Amazon on May 11.
