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Finished · Not yet premiered

The film is finished and has been submitted to the Sundance Film Festival 2027 in U.S. Short Film, Nonfiction. It has no screening history, it has no distributor, and it is not available online anywhere. Any link claiming otherwise is not ours.

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Thirty-six words

The wheelchair is the most-designed object nobody looks at. This film looks from inside. Owen Kent lost his hands, rebuilt his music on a rig he gave away, and now helps build a chair that thinks.

One line

A design film about the wheelchair, narrated and scored from inside the chair by the man who designs them.

The wheelchair is the most-designed object most people never look at. The mind files it under medical equipment and stops. The Chairs That Move Us refuses the filing and looks at it the way a museum would, from inside, narrated and scored by a man who has lived there thirty-three years and designs assistive technology for a living. He drives it with his chin.

Every purposeful act runs from intention, through a channel, to effect. Disability is a constrained channel: the will is intact, the world is willing, and the signal will not cross. Every wheelchair ever built is one answer, and the film treats each as what it is: a stubborn argument about what a body is allowed to be.

Owen Kent played piano with his hands until a progressive condition took them. The music here is his own, performed on an open-source lip joystick he built and gave away, so the score is evidence rather than decoration. Then to Pittsburgh, where his company and Dr. Rory Cooper's laboratory are building a chair you tell what and where, and that works out how.

The aspiration is not repair. It is a machine faithful enough to intention that the seam between person and tool stops being interesting. Not to claw back what was lost, but to hold what was never held, in the open, where it cannot be taken away.

Not an inspirational story, not a tech demo. The design film this object has been owed for a hundred years.

Written and Directed by

Owen Kent

Produced by

Andrew Balcof
Dany Muñoz
Owen Kent

Executive Producers

Todd Roberts
David Wilkinson

Featuring

Dr. Rory Cooper
Mansoor Khan
Dr. Zackory Erickson
Harry Kent

Director of Photography

Freddie Whitman

Editor

Rowan McKay

Original Score Composed and Performed by

Owen Kent

Gaffer

Cain Czopek

First Assistant Cinematographer

Lucas Wood

Sound Recording

Rebecca Watson
Christi Walker
Lucas Wood

Joysticks designed by

Marshall Saltz

Filmed at

Human Engineering Research Laboratories, University of Pittsburgh

• The title is The Chairs That Move Us, in italics, with every word capitalised.
• The subtitle is The wheelchair, reconsidered. It is a subtitle, not part of the title, and it carries its full stop.
• The film never names a diagnosis and neither should coverage taken from these pages. Its own phrase is "a progressive condition".
• The director is Owen Kent. He is the film's writer, director, narrator, subject and composer.
• The film has not been selected by any festival and has not premiered. It has been submitted, and that is the whole of its record. Please do not describe it otherwise until there is something to describe.