By Katy Cossette More than 70 million people stutter worldwide. “It feels like someone has a gun pointed in your face, that’s the only way that I can describe the feeling of stuttering. That puts the anxiety of it into words,” Jason Peterson, 33, described his stuttering. Peterson is featured in “When I Stutter,” a documentary film. Over four years of filming, you see snippets of Peterson’s speech therapy. In the first clip of the film, Peterson takes over a minute to introduce himself. Later on, he makes nerve-wracking phone calls to fast food joints to practice dialogue. By the end of the film, Peterson is able to introduce himself in a much shorter time frame, after his work in speech therapy. Although there is no cause nor cure to stuttering, the film shows that there are tools to manage it.
“It feels like someone has a gun pointed in your face, that’s the only way that I can describe the feeling of stuttering. That puts the anxiety of it into words.”
JASON PETERSON
“The thing that I’m most interested in about stuttering is the humanity inside of it,” John Gomez, the director, said. Featuring 19 Americans who stutter, “When I Stutter” creates an open dialogue about the speech disorder that is stuttering. There is an overwhelming human aspect to the film; subjects include a man who once quit talking for fear of stuttering, a mother of four who worries her kids will inherit her stutter, a retired motorcyclist, and a dancer who feels limited by her stutter. “If you could frame these stories appropriately, you could really help build awareness,” Gomez said. “If you could just get out of the stories way, and let them shine through.” He admitted to being an inexperienced filmmaker and feeling like he didn’t quite have his act together, but being able to learn from his subjects. “I feel like sometimes they answered the questions better than they were asked,” Gomez said.
