Tabakalera is a contemporary art center in San Sebastián housed in a restored tobacco factory. It's where the San Sebastián International Film Festival holds its conversations—forums that tackle pressing questions about the film industry. One session, titled Diversity and Inclusion On and Off Screen, offered a chance to think seriously about how disability is represented in cinema, and more broadly, about the contributions disabled people make to filmmaking itself.
Clare Baines, who works for the British Film Institute as Disability Equality Lead—a position created just a few years ago—moderated the discussion. The first speaker, activist Shani Dhanda, is a second-generation British immigrant. She laid out some essential ideas: disability is not a condition but an experience that happens when barriers exist or prejudice takes hold; we need to move away from a medical model (focused on cure) toward a social model (one that changes the environment creating barriers and inequalities); disability can affect anyone, even temporarily, so any real change benefits everyone; equity of treatment should give way to the elimination of inequity itself.
If we aspire to a world that stops creating inequality, why not imagine cinema as its mirror—rather than continuing to limit how disability appears on screen? One powerful way forward is to bring disabled people into the filmmaking process. Producer and director Justin Edgar, the second panelist, showed behind-the-scenes footage from films he's made.
To lend authenticity to these stories, it's worth involving people with direct experience of disability in the work behind the camera—even when that raises production costs. In the UK, dedicated funding exists for this reason: the industry has learned that genuine representation in film and television is impossible without the people who live these experiences. Edgar acknowledged that it would no longer be acceptable to cast a non-disabled actor in a disabled role, as happened in 2010 when Andy Serkis played the disabled musician Ian Dury in one of his earlier films.
These same questions animate the provocative work of young Argentine filmmaker Federico Luis, whose films screened at San Sebastián. When Luis was assisting at a drama school for disabled actors, he met Pehuén Pedre, an aspiring actor, and they became friends (we saw them together often during the festival). In the short Cómo ser Pehuén Pedre, written by both men, Pedre teaches two other actors how to imitate him. The effect is striking: instead of able-bodied actors observing and mimicking disability from the outside, here's a disabled person explaining his own disability and how to portray it.
From this starting point, Luis made his first feature, Simón de la montaña, starring Lorenzo Ferro, one of the two actors from the short. Ferro plays Simón, a boy who asks Pehuén to teach him how to perform disability well enough to get a certificate. Why Simón wants this remains unclear. But his total commitment to the role wins acceptance from the disabled teenagers he begins spending time with—kids who know the truth about him. Through Simón's eyes, we enter their lives as adolescents and realize how utterly ordinary they are, and how ordinary their families are too. Simón breaks down barriers through sheer presence. It's a high-concept provocation about how cinema should represent disability.