Thursday, neurodivergent shorts
Between the Lines (dramatic short, 10 minutes) 
By autistic filmmaker Blaise Borrer, “Between The Lines” offers an impressionistic glimpse into the lives and relationship of a mother and her twelve-year-old autistic son as the newly added pressures of high school begin to strain their already limited communication with each other.
Australia, 2021
Director: Blaise Borrer
Not a Wallflower (dramatic short, 8 minutes)
Ben, a spritely young autistic man has a bright future. Except when it comes to his boss. And finding love. Will he bloom beyond the wallflowers?
Australia, 2019
Director: Liam Mackessy
Late Afternoon (animated short, 9 minutes)
Emily finds herself disconnected from the world around her. She drifts back through her memories to relive different moments from her life. Emily must look to her past so that she may fully connect with the present. This animated, Oscar-nominated short offers an honest glimpse into the highs and lows of life with dementia.
Ireland, 2017, Director Louise Bagnall
Stim (dramatic short, 7 minutes)
An artistic ode to the practice of stimming, or self-stimulatory behavior, the repetition of physical movements or sounds, or repetitive movement of objects.
US, 2017
Director: Marrok Sedgwick
Tie Your Camel and Trust in God (documentary, 12 minutes)
A meditative documentary that explores what it’s like to be a Muslim with a mental illness.
Canada, 2021
Director: Niya Abdullahi
Feature Length Films
Intelligent Lives(70 min)
From award-winning filmmaker Dan Habib comes INTELLIGENT LIVES, a catalyst to transform the label of intellectual disability from a life sentence of isolation into a life of possibility for the most systematically segregated people in America. INTELLIGENT LIVES stars three pioneering young American adults with intellectual disabilities – Micah, Naieer, and Naomie – who challenge perceptions of intelligence as they navigate high school, college, and the workforce. Academy Award-winning actor and narrator Chris Cooper contextualizes the lives of these central characters through the emotional personal story of his son Jesse, as the film unpacks the shameful and ongoing track record of intelligence testing in the U.S. INTELLIGENT LIVES challenges what it means to be intelligent, and points to a future in which people of all abilities can fully participate in higher education, meaningful employment and intimate relationships.
USA, 2018, Director: Dan Habib
intelligentlives.org
Thunder Rolls! The World of Blind Baseball (documentary, 1 hour 35 minutes)
“THUNDER ROLLS! The World of Blind Baseball” follows the Indy Thunder Beep baseball team and their coach, Darnell Booker, in their quest to win a World Championship. Narrated by Jesse Eisenberg and with an original music score by Tyron Cooper, this is a spirited, humanistic sports story that operates on many levels of entertainment and social significance.
USA, 2023
Director: Robert Arnove and Susanne Schwibs
https://thundervisionfilm.com/
Saturday, Family Shorts
Luki, a charming and upbeat robot known for living life to the fullest, confronts a life-altering ALS diagnosis with the support of his friends.
USA, 2023 (Dramatic Animated Short, 11 Min)
Saturday, DCC intern picks
Siefe (Dramatic Short, 15 Min)
Hadamar, Germany, 1938: A young with disabilities is taken to a clinic for some “experimental treatments.” This film provides a personal glimpse into just one of the many lives lost in Nazi Germany’s T4 program.
Italy, 2021, Director: Riccardo Di Gerlando
This is Normal (19 min)
A young Deaf woman undergoes an experimental medical procedure that is supposed to “cure” her of her deafness and give her the ability to hear. Despite the controversy, Gwen risks her friends, culture, andidentity to discover the answer to the question, “Is it worth giving up who you’ve been for who you could become?”
USA, 2014, Director: Justin Giddings and Ryan Welsh
Wheelchair Wendy (Dramatic Short, 6 Min)
An eager-to-please doll in a wheelchair is placed in the perfect world of narcissistic Barbara, and must find a way to fit in or be thrown in the trash.
USA, 2018, Director: Shaina Ghuraya
The Gallery (Dramatic Short, 8 Min)
At an audition, Maya becomes part of an absurd cycle, and loses track of who she’s performing for and why. The Gallery is a narrative short that explores how some marginalized groups can be shut out of cultural institutions, and how they can feel pressured into perpetuating a system that doesn’t appear to be working in their favor.
UK, 2018, Director: Anthony Ing
The Right to be Rescued (Documentary, 15 Min)
The Right to Be Rescued is a short documentary about the impact of natural disasters on people with disabilities. This documentary tells the story of those disabled people left behind in Hurricane Katrina and what New Orleans and other cities are doing to make sure it never happens again.
USA, 2015, Director: Jordan Melograna
Saturday, “Cinemas of Disability” student picks
I Told You So (Documentary, 27 Min)
After years of debilitating period pain and unexplained symptoms, Malak finally gets a diagnosis: she has endometriosis. Despite being so prevalent, the disease has no known cause, no cure, and is not taken seriously, even by her own mother. In “I Told You So,” Malak grapples with a tumultuous relationship with her pain, her body and her dreams for the future.
Egypt/Germany/USA, 2023
The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms (Documentary Short, 10 Min)
A magical-realist window into a man’s experience of chronic illness, mixing paintings with live-action documentary footage to explore his inner world and relationship with his partner.
USA, 2021, Directors: Eloise Sherrid, Lauryn Welch
Existing Patient (Drama, 17 Min)
A chronically ill woman fights to get her medication approved, encountering endless phone trees, unhelpful representatives, and stock photo families along her journey through healthcare bureaucracy.
USA, 2023
Alpen (Experimental Short, 5 Min)
Alpen offers images of Emma, who lives with chronic pain, moving through familiar pathways in her kitchen. Her movements are complex and choreographic as she shifts her weight between surfaces. The imagery is accompanied by a poem that she wrote about her day-to-day movement and the sound of her steps and the wheels of her stool are overlaid with sounds of snowboarders in the Swiss Alps. These different layers resist binary divisions of space and time into before and after pain.
UK, 2020
Voice Notes from Palestine (Documentary Short, 10 Min)
Action on Armed Violence has released ‘Voice Notes from Palestine’, a powerful short film that features the testimonies of Palestinian students with disabilities from the Islamic University of Gaza, detailing their experiences of suffering, loss, resilience and hope during Israel’s year-long mass bombardment and siege of the Gaza Strip. In 2023, the students participated in an online course led by Dr Iain Overton, Director of AOAV, in collaboration with Dr Nazmi Al-Masri and his staff at the University of Gaza. The course aimed to empower the students to use social media as a means of telling their stories. Horrifically, one of the students who participated on the course, Aya Kafafi, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in July 2024, along with her father, sister, and several nieces and nephews.
Palestine, 2024, Director: Amal Al-Agroobi
Sunday, DCA picks
As You Are (Dramatic Short, 15 Min)
When an interabled queer couple spends the night together for the first time, they must confront their complex relationships with desire, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and what it means truly to love another person.
USA, 2023
Don’t Come In…Yet!
(Experimental Short, 10 Min)
As a wheelchair user, Jake is constantly watched over by his dad and lauded for his bravery by everyone. Now 18, he’s finally been left at home, without supervision, with his best friend June. Together, they plan to use the opportunity to have sex. But his overbearing dad, a spider and an ageing football superstar present some complications. Most of all they reinforce the macabre nature of life as a disabled person in society.
Australia, 2021, Director: Isaac Dean Elliott
Lefty & Loosey (5 Min)
In this techy ode to film noir, two amputee veterans turned private investigators uncover a diabolical plot and must overcome their fears to crack the code and save the world.
USA, 2016, Director: Zico Abrar
Dancer (Drama, 13 Min)
Gerelee, a Deaf teenage girl, decides to follow her dreams and audition for a dance company despite her father’s protests.
Mongolia/Austrailia, 2023
ReAct (Dramatic Short, 4 Min)
A self-employed Japanese wheelchair dancer born with Spina Bifida confronts the elmeents, natural and human in lyrical, unexpected ways.
Japan, 2019, Director: Takahiro Sato and Nobuyuki Arai
The Multi (Dramatic Short, 18 Min)
An isolated Black Deaf woman has constructed a world of order to keep a childhood trauma buried deep in her psyche. Then an unexpected turn of events forces her to confront her demons from the past, who threatens to destroy everything she has built.
USA, 2021, Director: Natasha Ofili and Storm Smith