Easterseals Disability Film Challenge Founder and Director, Nic Novicki, who presented at the Golden Globes this year, kicked off the 2022 Easterseals Disability Film Challenge at the Sundance Film Festival.   He was joined by Karim Ahmad, Director of Outreach and Inclusion for the Sundance Institute; and eight-time film challenge participants.

Easterseals is one of the HFPA’s grantees, spearheaded by Novicki. He explains the event, “It’s an annual film competition where participants from around the world, write, shoot, edit, and submit three-to-five-minute films based on our assigned genre. Each film must have somebody with a disability in the film. These films are creating opportunities for people with disabilities in front of and behind the camera, and they’re changing the way the world views disability.”

Ahmad weighs in. “I’m always really grateful to be here and in this space with Easterseals. This accessibility partnership, and our year-round work, has been going on for four years now which is amazing and fantastic, and it’s so meaningful to Sundance and to me personally,” he says.  “The work that we do with Easterseals is so foundational to the work that I’m trying to do within Sundance, which is to build more space and more pathways to sustainability and creative development and professional development for artists with disabilities.”

The Sundance Film Festival has stepped up to the plate and has increased accessibility pertaining to people with disabilities.  “This is our most accessible festival ever with unprecedented access of ASL interpreters across all our panel programming, including post-screening Q&A’s. All films are closed captioned as they were last year,” said Ahmad.

Speaking of the collaboration between Easterseals and the Sundance Institute, it has impacted the disabled community on a global level.  “First and foremost, the fact that we’re continuing to make films during a global pandemic, I consider that our biggest success. The film challenge has grown significantly in 2020 with the most films ever, and then this last year we beat our record,” said Novicki.

 He smiles. “That is something I’m truly proud of and that these films are screening at film festivals around the world. We have some film challenge participants that have screened at 100 film festivals already which is truly amazing.   We’re doing year-round workshops, seminars, and networking opportunities for our film challenge participants and we’re getting them professional development,” he says.  “We are working with our studios and our networks and all those partners that are helping us get opportunities for people with disabilities in front of and behind the camera.

Speaking of opportunities for the disabled behind and in front of the camera, the Saux family whose several films feature their son, Liam, who has Down Syndrome and is currently starring in Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick.  Steven Saux, Liam’s father says, “We’re so happy to be celebrating the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge for our eighth year now, and to have a film that Liam is in, written and directed by Lena Dunham, is pretty amazing. We love the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge and it’s been such a big part of our lives.”

Evidently, the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge has provided an educational as well as an entertaining outlet for the disabled and provides a platform for the mainstream to appreciate their work.  Liam’s mother, Lori, sums it up perfectly.  “We never knew where the Challenge was going to take us.  But here we are at Sundance!” she says with a smile.  “So, you never know.  You just need to keep moving forward.”