She Was Once Called the World’s Ugliest Woman—Now She’s Living Your Dreams
Nearly two years ago, during a TEDxWomen talk in Austin, Texas, Lizzie Velasquez told a room full of strangers all the things she wanted to accomplish in her lifetime: become a motivational speaker, write a book, graduate from college, start a family, and launch a career. Save for starting a family, the 26-year-old woman doctors thought would never walk, talk, or crawl has checked every one of those dreams off her to-do list. Now she can add to it yet another achievement: star in a movie.
A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story, which opened in theaters last week, tells the story of Velasquez’s journey from bullied little girl to international YouTube star to political activist lobbying Congress for anti-bullying policies in Washington, D.C.
The graduate of Texas State University was born with a rare congenital disease that impairs her vision, strains her heart, and prevents her from gaining weight, which means she’s never weighed more than about 65 pounds. Despite her health condition, Velasquez, the oldest of three children, lived a fairly normal life. She even became a high school cheerleader.
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But everything changed during her senior year of high school, when she clicked on an eight-second YouTube video titled “World’s ugliest woman.” The woman in the clip, she was horrified to discover, was her. There were 4 million views and thousands of comments: “People saying, ‘Please just do the world a favor, put a gun to your head and kill yourself,’ ” she recalled during her TEDxWomen talk in December 2013. “In my mind, the best way that I could get back at all those people who made fun of me, who teased me, who called me ugly, who called me a monster, was to make myself better,” she told a crowd of mostly women, many of them moved to tears.
“The reception online was no different, and it really in a very short amount of time took all of our breath away, the support it was getting and the amount of sharing,” Sara Bordo, the Texas native who produced the event, told TakePart. To date, the 13-minute YouTube clip has been viewed more than 9.6 million times and helped make Velasquez a global spokesperson for the anti-bullying movement. “But what we kept seeing more and more was kids, adults, both genders, all ethnicities, just kept saying, ‘I wish it was longer. Can we hear more?’ ”
That’s when Bordo, a former marketing executive who had never directed a film, took a leap of faith and pitched Velasquez on the feature-length documentary that become A Brave Heart. Her family had been repeatedly approached by film and reality-TV producers looking to tell her story, but this time felt different, Velasquez recalled at a recent screening in Los Angeles. She said yes on the spot, and thus began a whirlwind fund-raising campaign that racked up more than $200,000 in less than 30 days, breaking a Kickstarter record as one of its highest-funded documentary campaigns.
“I just asked enough advice from other filmmakers to point me in the right direction, but I didn’t ask too much to have other people’s way of doing it in my head,” said Bordo, who accompanied Velasquez for four months during doctor’s appointments at home and at speaking engagements all over the world, shooting much of it herself on a GoPro after she ran out of funding. The film is bookended by Velasquez’s talk last year in front of more than 10,000 people at an education conference in Mexico City, where she shared the stage with Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg.
At the heart of the documentary is Velasquez’s trip to D.C. last year, where she met with politicians and parents in an effort to push Congress to pass the Safe Schools Improvement Act. First introduced by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., in 2007, the bill would require schools to prohibit bullying and harassment in their codes of conduct and establish uniform standards for elementary and secondary schools to track and report instances of bullying. Because the federal government does not record the data, there are few statistics to show how many people are affected by bullying, which populations are most at risk, and how schools can best respond to it.
Advocates, including a number of LGBT groups, see the bill as a simple step toward addressing the sometimes deadly consequences of bullying and harassment, but many policy makers see it as an unnecessary measure. Just 95 of the 535 members of Congress support the bill, according to an online interactive campaign launched by the Brave Heart filmmakers.
Despite the dismal response from Congress, Bordo and Velasquez have only begun to ramp up their advocacy efforts in D.C. With October designated as National Bullying Prevention Month, the duo are planning to pay another visit to Capitol Hill, where they’ll host screenings and talks they hope will influence policy makers.
“Lizzie brings a sense of survival to this issue and a sense of thriving on the other side of it, only because of her personal sense of drive and purpose to make it better for other kids,” said Bordo. “And that, we hope, is the missing link to getting more support for the bill.”
Their mission is reinforced by the dozens of parents they meet whose children have committed suicide after experiencing bullying. Bordo said, “We have parents who have lost children who are always telling us, ‘Your story is so important because maybe that would have given [our] children the hope to hang on.’ ”
Related stories on TakePart:
• Here's the One Thing That Makes a Kid More Likely to Be Bullied in School
• A 15-Year-Old Tech Genius Is Using Her Coding Skills to Curb Cyberbullying
Original article from TakePart
