Abled is an inspirational film but it is not inspiration porn. This documentary, which is part of the 2023 Dances with Films festival, follows Paralympian Blake Leeper training for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games while he is in a legal battle with the World Athletics on whether his prosthetic legs give him an advantage. [click to continue...]
My Eyes Are Up Here is an odyssey to get the morning after pill. How could a short film be an odyssey? When a disabled woman of color needs to travel to a pharmacy for the morning after pill, the number of obstacles and quick assumptions she has to face parallels those of Odysseus. The [click to continue...]
What if your mom came back as a fish? Current Entertainment and News Media Fellow and Entertainment Lab Alumnus Jeremy Hsing’s most recent short, FISH, answers that question. His answers led him to win a Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Astoria Film Festival last weekend. We meet Tiger, played beautifully by co-writer Patrick Zhang, [click to continue...]
On May 2, 2023, after failing to come to an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (which includes 350+ TV and film studios and production companies), the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike – stopping all writing projects and bringing many Hollywood productions to a halt. Since 2018, screenwriters’ [click to continue...]
Salt Lake City, UT, April 20 – A new report by Luminate found that disability representation on screen was by far and away the lowest of any minority group they analyzed. In 2021, there were only five main title cast roles in film for people who identified as disabled. The following year, there were just [click to continue...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUtv8kYDe5s Rachel Handler (she/her), a 2020 RespectAbility Entertainment Lab Alumna, wrote, starred, and produced “Unlucky in Love” for this year’s Easterseals Disability Film Challenge. During the film Challenge, filmmakers have five days to write and produce a three to five minute short based on a centralizing theme. This year’s focus was romance. Rachel Handler’s “Unlucky [click to continue...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUaFWBf1t-U For this year’s Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, Cory Reeder (he/him) wrote and directed a short on the trials and tribulations of being a female wheelchair user on the dating apps. The Disability Challenge gives participants five days to write, shoot, edit and submit a film around one common theme. This year’s genre was romance, [click to continue...]
Salt Lake City, March 23 – Faith Strongheart—writer, filmmaker, and 2020 RespectAbility Lab alumna—won the most recent NYWIFT Loreen Arbus Disability Awareness Grant for her deeply personal documentary Faith Brings the Wild. This grant supports a film that amplifies the voices of people with physical or developmental disabilities in the post-production phase. While Strongheart is still [click to continue...]
Salt Lake City, Feb 23 – Aleeya, written and directed by RespectAbility Lab Alum Nina Mahesh (she/her), follows a trans woman in small-town India as she tries to buy a sewing machine for her boyfriend. This short film is both a simple love story and an intricate depiction of how trans women are treated in [click to continue...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCcnn-qbm5c Oreo explores identity and nonconformity through four different black women’s experiences. The short film centers around the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” It looks at black identity through religion, class, race, and culture, and does so [click to continue...]
