DaytonDailyNews.com

DAYTON — Moviegoers attending the opening of the new movie "Blindness" on Friday, Oct. 4, at the Showcase South near the Dayton Mall were confronted by about 15 protesters from the National Federation for the Blind, according to the regional president of the National Federation of the Blind.

"We held up signs and encouraged people not to go. Some of them didn't go," said Richard Payne, president of the organization's Miami Valley chapter.

Payne said police and theater managers asked the protesters to move off the theater property to a nearby corner past which some of the moviegoers drove on their way to the showing Friday night.

"It uses a lot of the stereotypes that we fought for years," Payne said. "It makes it seem like blind people are not human."

However Payne said no protests were staged at the Showcase Huber Heights or Regal Cinema in Beavercreek, two other area theaters showing the film.

No other protests are planned, although Payne said his group would continue to distribute leaflets and perhaps mount an Internet campaign discouraging people from attending the film.

"I'm totally blind. I don't think like that. I don't want other people thinking like that," Payne said.

The film is based on a book also boycotted by the National Federation for the Blind in 2007, Payne said.

The film depicts blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves and trading sex for food, according to Marc Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based group.

"The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," said Maurer. "Blindness doesn't turn decent people into monsters."

The federation planned to protest the movie, released by Miramax Films, at

75 theaters around the country.

Miramax released a statement that read, in part,

"We are saddened to learn that the National Federation of the Blind plans to protest the film 'Blindness.'"

Based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, "Blindness" imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light — resulting in a collapse of the social order in an unnamed city. Julianne Moore stars as the wife of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.

The book was praised for its use of blindness as a metaphor for the lack of clear communication and respect for human dignity in modern society.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2261 or lbudd@DaytonDailyNews.com.