Easterseals Disability Film Challenge Winners Announced At Gala Ceremony

Forbes

09-05-2025

The film and TV industry is notoriously hard to break into. The difficulty level is usually increased by several orders of magnitude for people with disabilities due to an unfortunate combination of access barriers and negative attitudes amongst those holding the purse strings in Hollywood.
It was in recognition of these hurdles that disabled actor and comedian Nic Novicki created the Disability Film Challenge 12 years ago. Standing at 3 foot 10 and having dealt with several congenital health challenges throughout his life, Novicki knows what it takes to break through Hollywood's glass ceiling and has over 50 film and TV shows to his name. Most recently, he voiced Lego Spider-Man in Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation's award-winning film, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
The rules of the Disability Film Challenge are simple but the undertaking itself certainly lives up to its name. Contestants are given just five days to write and produce a one-to-five-minute film once the annual theme is revealed. This year's theme was thriller and suspense. The films don't have to explicitly deal with disability but there must be at least one person with a disability either in front of or behind the camera. A total of 123 submissions were received this year from all over the world.
Last night saw the 2025 Disability Film Challenge awards ceremony take place at a special orange carpet event at Sony Pictures Studios located in Culver City, California. Amongst the luminaries presenting awards were two-time Oscar-winning writer, producer and director Peter Farrelly (Ricky Stanicky, Loudermilk, Greenbook, Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber), Skye P. Marshall (Matlock, Good Sam, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Black Lightning) and Marissa Bode who recently reprised the role of Nessarose Thropp in the film adaptation of Wicked.
The growing list of corporate sponsors is impressive, too. Whilst Easterseals, one of the largest and best-known suppliers of disability services across the U.S., has been the main sponsor of the challenge since 2017 – today the likes of Amazon MGM Studios, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Global, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros and Discovery all make valuable financial contributions – ensuring the Film Challenge's sustainability.
This year saw a clean sweep of the awards for Best Film and Best Director for Everhand and its Director, Shane Hillier. This dark and somewhat manic depiction features Lee Cleveland, a congenital amputee, as Abe, a one-armed farmer, and Sarah Beth Budd as his wife Edie. Abe purchases a mechanical arm that holds the promise of solving all his problems but instead a nightmare ensues as the couple are terrorized by a ghoulish sales rep.
Everhand movie poster
Shane Hillier
An overwhelming sense of menace and foreboding is also a notable feature of Day 21 and We'll Meet Again, which won the awards for Best Actor and Best Writer, respectively. The former stars Dashiell Meier, a young man with Down Syndrome, who also directs as a survivor in a world where some type of apocalyptic event appears to have wiped out most humans but spared those with Down Syndrome. Meanwhile, in We'll Meet Again, co-starring and co-written by Danny Kurtzman (Good Bad Things) and Steve Way, a young man with mobility challenges played by Kurtzman enjoys romantic nightly phone calls with a mysterious woman he has met online until matters take a sinister twist.
The other award winners approached the thriller/suspense genre from a different angle. In Emergency Plan, directed by Anna Pakman and starring Margo Gignac and James Ian, which won the award for Best Awareness, raw emotion takes centre stage. The story features two wheelchair users as a couple trapped in their high-rise apartment block in the aftermath of an earthquake, who are forced to make an impossible decision to save the life of their young son.
In the zany Hypothetically, the End, for which director Lily Drummond won the award for Best Editor, two best friends scramble to marry during the dying embers of New Year's Eve 1999, convinced that the Y2K bug is about to usher forth the end of days.
Winners will receive a $2,000 cash prize in addition to a $5,000 seed fund/film finishing grant provided by Adobe to further develop the winning short film and/or to accelerate the development of their projects into feature films or episodic series. There will be significant mentoring opportunities too.
Perhaps the largest reward, though, comes from the exposure. Following his participation in the challenge, autistic actor Nick Sanchez was able to book a role and can currently be seen in theatres in The Accountant 2 alongside Ben Affleck.
There is also gravitas in the collective message. All the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge finalist films can be viewed on its YouTube channel and this visibility is key. According to the CDC, over 25% of U.S. residents live with some form of disability, and yet a study released last summer by USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative revealed that the number of speaking characters with a disability in a major film was just 1.9% in 2022. GLAAD also published a report in the same year, which found that only 2.8% of series regulars on primetime broadcast TV (22 of 775) were characters with disabilities. This lack of visibility and representation obscures and sidelines the disability community. While the long-term industry and societal trends affecting this may be slow to change, the ultra-focus and hyper visibility resulting from endeavors like the Disability Film Challenge make it that much harder to look the other way.