Hollywood Inclusion

Don’t question yourself when you feel the need to fully realize your ninja skills and join a secret neighborhood fight club. It’s the thing to do now-a-days, especially after watching Disney’s Launchpad BLACK BELTS, a short about a Compton teenager quietly pursuing his father’s footsteps by learning how to use a secret and powerful form of street fighting.

“What I want people to take away from the film, is a sense of family rebuilding, fun, and enjoying watching film again,” said BLACK BELTS writer Xavier Stiles, who also served as a faculty advisor for the RespectAbility Entertainment Lab. Stiles is a Compton, California native, and a person with diabetes. [continue reading…]

TV content fosters a unique connection between audiences and characters, so it’s clear that people want to see themselves and their stories represented on screen. However, for TV to reflect audiences’ realities, the identities of TV writers need to reflect those of the population. While the disabled membership of the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) has doubled from 0.6% in 2021 to 1.3% in 2022, Canadian disabled writers are underrepresented in every TV format in proportion to their population size. [continue reading…]

On November 1, Disney will release the second season of their animated children’s show, Firebuds, which follows a group of friends and their first responder vehicles as they help others in their community, and even themselves. Notably, the Season 2 episode Wrong Way Rescue highlights a learning disability not commonly known called dyscalculia.

Dyscalculia is a learning disability that affects an individual’s ability to process numbers and math-based thinking, with an estimated 2-8% of the population having it. Wrong Way Rescue focuses on the character Axl, an anthropomorphic ambulance, who appears to have difficulty remembering the right address when an emergency call comes in. Axl initially struggles with counting in order, and then reverses the address number, taking her first responder friends up and down the street. Throughout the episode, Axl navigates feelings of embarrassment and confusion until she encounters another character who explains her disability with a catchy song. [continue reading…]

Trigger Warning: Suicide

A documentary produced by Bode Miller and Brett Rapkin, The Paradise Paradox is a very emotional and serious piece. The film explores the overwhelming number of cases of suicide due to the mental health crisis affecting the snowy mountain towns of the United States, in particular Eagle Valley, Colorado, Mammoth Mountain, California, and Winter Pack, Colorado. [continue reading…]

In celebration of National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), Delta Air Lines is featuring seven disability-inclusive films in a Top Picks collection on their seatback, in-flight entertainment. Six of these films were written and/or directed by Disabled filmmakers, and all include Disabled individuals in front of the camera. In addition, these films are available with captions and audio description, creating accessibility for viewers who are deaf and/or blind.

Learn more at the Delta Studio website.

“As both an executive producer of Being Michelle and Vice Chair of RespectAbility, which has worked on some of the projects included in the Delta Studio NDEAM Top Picks collection, I am excited for the world to experience entertainment with powerful disability perspectives told through a lens in which disabled persons had a direct hand in creating both behind and in front of the camera,” said RespectAbility Vice Chair Delbert Whetter, who is a deaf filmmaker based in Los Angeles. [continue reading…]

“Wherever you go there you are,” a phrase popularized by Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction founder John Kabat Zin to describe how leaving a traumatic situation doesn’t mean the trauma has left you. For war refugees, despite leaving the physical site of destruction, the aftershocks seem to reverberate inside of them for years to come.

Netflix’s latest short documentary film Camp Courage shines a light on war refugees’ resilient capacity for connection and care in the face of those trauma aftershocks. Directed and produced by Max Lowe, Camp Courage tells the story of a pair of Ukrainian refugees at an outdoors-healing summer camp in the Austrian Alps. The film follows ten-year-old Milana, and her grandmother Olga on their individual and intertwining journeys through the challenges the camp presents to each of them. Milana is faced with scaling tall mountains, and Olga is confronted with parenting a preteen who lost her mom. Each of them must lean on the support of community and ultimately each other to reach their respective goals. [continue reading…]

Los Angeles, Oct 17 – Director Derek Dabkoski’s masterly made documentary, Derek Changes His Mind, is a stunning and emotional piece. It follows the story of Dabkoski himself, who acquired a traumatic brain injury, leaving the right half of his body disabled, and his family’s struggle to gain citizenship and afford medical treatments for his disability to have better lives for themselves and their daughter.

In the documentary, Dabkoski talks about his life after acquiring his traumatic brain injury, including researching many kinds of medical treatments and studies to receive stem cells. This treatment would help restore some functionality to his right hand and leg to improve not only his life, but also help him support his wife and their young daughter. The course of the documentary displays many of the challenges that Derek and his family have had to face, from financial difficulties and immigration status to lack of access to medical treatments and studies needed for Derek’s disability. [continue reading…]

Radha Mehta’s brilliant narrative short film, DOSH, follows a hard-of-hearing mother as a night with her husband’s traditional family goes amiss; while spotlighting the fight against familial denialism and damp cold alienation that many Disabled people face — while also maintaining a dark and thrilling plot.

The title, DOSH, is Hindi for “fault.” In the film, the protagonist confronts her mother-in-law about her husband’s mental health hoping for a mother’s support, but she’s quickly shut down. Things go awry when her husband retaliates by ripping the assistive hearing devices from the protagonist’s ears during a pre-wedding ritual. Overall, this an intersectional masterpiece. It weaves the culture of Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities with South-Asian taboos like disability being shameful or a punishment from God, while also leveraging the dramatic tension of a husband and wife in freefall. A pivotal scene at the end of the film depicts the deeply empathetic protagonist kneeling down in the tub with her distraught husband, the one who tossed her assistive hearing devices. [continue reading…]

With recording artist and award-winning advocate Lachi and James Ian at the helm, RAMPD (the global network of Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities) has come together to create the piano-driven Adult Contemporary record “Lift Me Up,” featuring Gaelynn Lea. The video concept is a tribute to the late disability rights activist Judy Heumann and a salute to deaf culture, with a fully disabled production team. The visuals are performed by three notable Deaf ASL performers (Amber Galloway, Otis Jones, and Nell) in the New York City video studio “Gymnopedie,” while vocals from Lachi, James, and Gaelynn are performed in Quad Recording studio. RAMPD and Lachi put together a well-established award-winning BIPOC, LGBTQ, and disabled crew featuring Catriona Rubenis-Stevens (Director/Producer), Day Al-Mohamed (Co-Director), Caroline Mariko Stucky (DP), Jake Primmerman (Editor), April Rose (Co-Writer, Mixing & Mastering), and Kulick (Mixing & Mastering).

Judy Heumann was the quintessential champion for disability rights and breaking barriers. She took on the New York Board of Education and the federal government, shut down streets, and organized national sit-ins paving the way for all the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) benefits we see today. A fierce leader, friend, selfless change maker, and a legend in the disability community, she was a good friend to Lachi, Ian, and Gaelynn. Judy passed away in March of 2023. Learn more about her and her work on her website.

“After my good friend and mentor Judy Heumann passed, I began writing this song just to cope,” Lachi said. “And wow, this thing has blown up in such a beautiful way. I couldn’t have asked for a better cast of co-writers, performers, and crew to lift inclusion, community, and belonging in this way. As artists it is our job to tell compelling stories through competitive art in the hope of creating social impact. However, every single human involved in this project worked from a place of love, and it shines brightly through this piece. I believe society is ready – ready for authentic, compelling, quality content celebrating Disability culture.” [continue reading…]