2025 Film Festival
The Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival and Short Film Competition aims to change the picture of disability through film. The top cinematic celebration of disability in the state, the Festival features the work of independent filmmakers from around the world, from documentaries to animated shorts to the avant-garde. The festival provides a unique and entertaining way to positively and accurately view disability.
Highlights from the 2025 Festival
Download the Wrap-Up as a PDF
On September 20th, 2025, film lovers and friends of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities gathered at the Long Center in Austin, Texas for the 22nd annual Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival. Attendees enjoyed a full night of entertainment, including three blocks of short films, live music, a panel with disability advocates, and a Q&A with visiting filmmaker Spencer P Sherwin.
Gretchen McMahon, a local musician with a disability, joined the Fest again to provide music during pre-show and intermissions. McMahon is a multi-instrumentalist with a genre-bending style that explores five hundred years of music in five minutes, rooted in folk, world, jazz, and Celtic sounds.
Program highlights included the First Place Documentary Winner SIMPLE MACHINE and the First Place Non-Documentary winner DREAMSCAPES.
SIMPLE MACHINE is part portrait of an architect who became an amputee in midlife, and part meditation on the beauty and challenges of classical mechanics in the ingenious tools of our everyday lives.
DREAMSCAPES is a genre-blurring experimental film centered on a powerful performance by Amelia Rose Griffin. The film transforms her lived experience into movement, colour, and sound. Dreamscapes gives voice to experiences that are often hidden because of shame, stigma, and silence.
Disability advocates updated us on the fight for higher attendant wages in the state of Texas. After a block of short films exploring attendant care, Edgar Pacheco and Chase Bearden (pictured below, with moderator Laura Perna) shared their thoughts on the films, their experiences using attendants, and some insights on the ongoing movement to raise wages for attendants.
People traveled from all over the state to attend the Festival this year, including two Fest guests who were featured in the program. Spencer P Sherwin (below left) is the director of IN CASE OF FIRE, which won 3rd place in the Non-Documentary Division. Maddy Ullman (below right) is one of our Fest judges, as well as a disability film consultant.
In addition to introing the block of films featuring IN CASE OF FIRE, Spencer joined us during audience voting to discuss the making of his film (below right, with Louise Ho). Spencer shouted out some of the influences behind his artistic choices and shared the process of getting the impressive wheelchair stunts for the film. He encouraged everyone to find creative outlets.
Maddy joined us onstage to announce this year’s recipient of the Gene R. Rodger Creative Advocacy Award, the Thunder and Lightning Poetry Collective (pictured below, right). The audience voted on their favorite film of the night, which went to QUAD LIFE (3rd place winner, Documentary Division, pictured second row).
This year, the Festival screened 11 short films to an audience of 72 attendees.
Anonymous feedback from attendees:
“Excellent as always. I always feel I’ve learned, am thinking differently, and am uplifted.”
“Creative, thought-provoking, fun!”
In 2025, Cinema Touching Disability expanded our year-round programming with a number of partner screenings, including:
- A screening series with ADAPT of Texas at their monthly potluck community gatherings
- A partnership screening of the documentary LIFE AFTER with the Austin Film Society
- A film exchange with AWEbility Wee Festival and the Austin Mayor’s Committee on People with Disabilities at City Hall
- A public outdoor screening to celebrate the opening of the Onion Creek Metro Park all abilities playground
