(Citizenship) Unspeakable

Stuttering is as old as human speech. The biblical Moses stuttered. Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe and King George VI were afflicted. Yet it remains a medical enigma. Unspeakable examines the nature, history and treatment of a speech impediment that affects about 1% of the world’s population regardless of language, culture, class or ethnicity.

John Paskievich, the film's director, is a person who stutters. He narrates and is an active participant in the film. His story and the stories of others in the film are poignant, funny, angry and courageous, providing eloquent testimony to what it means to live imprisoned in what the poet W.H. Auden called "the tower of stutter." The director describes the film as: "a call for liberation not from stuttering, but from the ignorance and stigma that surround it."