The many challenges disabled delegates can face at festivals and events prompted the British Film Institute (BFI) to four UK-based disabled filmmakers to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) industry offering IFFR Pro last week.
Ella Glendining, Anna Keeley, Sarah Leigh and Cristián Saavedra attended as part of a joint initative between the BFI Inclusion team and IFFR, supported by the BFI International Fund.
IFFR was chosen for what is one of the first delegations of its kind because Rotterdam was regarded as “quite accessible” as a city and could be reached from London by the high-speed Eurostar rail link.
“Festivals are inherently inaccessible,” said BFI director of inclusion Melanie Hoyes, who devised the initiative. “It’s [about] trying to figure out the website, how to book a ticket, where they are, what the weather is like, if they’re busy, there are always networking drinks [which aren’t great] if you don’t drink, stay out late or aren’t good at talking to lots of people.”
The aim was “to provide a space that feels welcoming and inclusive to a group normally held out of these spaces,” said the BFI’s Hoyes.
Common sense measures helped to achieve this: choosing a festival accessible by rail; the delegates being provided with “an “access coordinator” by Rotterdam to find restaurants and hotels that are accessible to us; organising interviews in venues that were quiet and accessible; a representative from their team who has been on the ground and brought passes to the hotel. ”Little things like that have made it [the festival] really welcoming. There’s a lot of preparation that goes into it. We talk to the filmmakers beforehand about what they are looking for. We try to do that scoping beforehand. They had access to CineMart and were taking meetings.”
Hoyes strongly praised IFFR Pro’s Alessia Acone and Marten Rabarts for facilitating the trip. “They’ve been so supportive and they really want to learn how they can do better,” she said.
“While we’re here with the cohort, we are also taking it as a test bed and will be feeding back on any issues that have come up.
“From our point of view, the biggest measure of success is that the delegation has a good time and do what they needed to do,” Hoyes continued. “It’s legitimising [the delegates] as filmmakers. It’s not charity. They’re here because they are good at what they do.”
Cardiff-based Chilean filmmaker Saavedra was taking meetings in Rotterdam on his feature documentary about 1990s US pop star, Scatman John.
If Scatman Can Do It, So Can You already has development support from Ffilm Cymru and is being produced by Toby Cameron of On Par Productions.
“The idea is not only paying homage to a great musician from the ’90s but also getting to a place where, as artists, we should start seeing pop culture and reinterpreting it in different ways,” Saavedra stated. “As a blind filmmaker, I have the challenge of breaking boundaries in my own career but I also think there is no point of working on stuff just for a niche audience.”
Writer-director Leigh - who founded Inclusivity Films which launched in 2022 and is committed to at least 50% of cast and crew identifying as d/Deaf, disabled and/or neurodivergent on every production - was in Rotterdam pitching her feature project Found (working title).It is a magical realist drama about an autistic woman who uses Tarot cards to guide her on a road trip in search of long-lost family.
Leigh has auditory processing needs and finds noisy, crowded festival environments very uncomfortable. “Knowing I was going with a delegation that would be thinking about this has been super-helpful,” she said.
Producer Keeley is developing her debut feature, the English-French language psychological thriller Punch Drunk directed by Liam White, for Escape Plan. It is at advanced script stage and is due to shoot in Marseilles as a UK-French coproduction, possibly with a third European partner. Escape Plan founder Oliver Kassman will exec produce the project. “Liam and I have been talking for a while because I loved his shorts. This is a spec script that I came on board to produce,” she said.
Writer-director Glendining, whose autobiographical feature documentary Is There Anybody Out There? premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, was at IFFR talking up her next project Curiosities Of Fools, an historical drama about the life of a court dwarf in the 17th century. The film reteams her with Hot Property’s Janine Marmot.
“I don’t want to be put in a box and be seen as just the disabled filmmaker, but equally my films will always have an element of disability to them…it is about milking it without making disability forefront. The work has to be the most important thing,” Glendining said.
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