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2026 Film Festival

Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival

23rd Annual Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival. September 5th 2026, Austin Central Library, Austin TX.

2026 Short Film Competition

The 2026 Short Film Competition submissions are now closed, and will reopen in 2027. Judges have complete their review, and Finalists and Semi-finalists are listed below. Finalists will be screened at the 2026 Festival on September 5th, and winners will be announced that night!

Finalists

Blind Faith
Dir. Claire Coaché, Lisle Turner
BLIND FAITH is a film about denial and acceptance. Set in a British Nigerian wedding party, a young blind man struggles with his devout parent’s refusal to accept his condition. An unwelcome attempted healing brings a crisis point.

CHAPTER 21
Dir. Katie Stoneburner, Ellen Burling
An anxious young couple attends an appointment that challenges their expectations of parenthood and brings them to confront their uncertainties of their future son.

DECAYING: Behind the Seams
Dir. Drew Heriot
35 neurodiverse kids. 23 Saturdays. 10 zombies. 1 short film. Drag your rotting corpse behind the seams of this handmade horror and discover a love letter to creativity, neurodiversity, and organized chaos.

Luz de Sombra
Dir. Rubén J. Méndez
Mayra Adriana Rivera found in blind football a space of freedom and confidence. From this passion, Goals with Vision was born: a project that understands football not only as competition, but as a therapeutic tool that helps strengthen both body and spirit. Through her team, Mayra shares a story of friendship and resilience.

MisundersHood
Iryna Sosimovych
"Misundershood" is an author’s story about war seen through the eyes of a vulnerable person. Oleksa lives in claim and at his own pace until war destroys his fragile inner balance. Left alone with fear and isolation, he must find whether trust in people is still possible.

The goalkeeper
Dir. Salvatore Lizzio, Daniele Bonarini
It’s 1944 and a group of friends with disabilities are playing a soccer game until Zeno, the goalkeeper and youngest of the team, is taken by Nazis. This prompts the others to embark on an unlikely rescue mission.

The Thousand and One Lives of Sid
Dir. Philippe Dinh, Patrick Muller
Sid, a deaf entrepreneur and founder of the activist restaurant 1000 & 1 Signes, is about to turn a major page in his professional life. Today, his restaurant is closing its doors for good : it is the very last day of service. He looks back on 25 years of commitment, on the battles he has fought for inclusion, and on the need to reinvent himself.

The View from Down Here
Dir. Sylvia Longmire
The View From Down Here is an observational short documentary told entirely from a seated point of view. Moving through art museums, bars, elevators, parks, and everyday thresholds, a wheelchair user reveals how perspective shapes what is seen, what is missed, and how connection unfolds in spaces designed for standing bodies. Quiet and meditative, the film invites viewers to experience the world from below eye level.

Honorable Mention

Screening date TBA

The Adventures of Angosat
Dir. Resem Verkron, Marc Serena

Semi-finalists

Amidst a sea of trees
Dir. Jorge Aparicio

As the Sea
Dir. Andrea Corazza

Bad Luck
Dir. Jan Eilhardt, Tanzar Bremen

Deaf Date
Dir. David Levy, Paul Persic

Dimentia has a PR Problem
Dir. Jennifer Hardacker, Amanda Stead, Madison Stoker

Ever Green & The F***ing Spectrum
Dir. Peter Kangas

FOCUS THROW
Dir. kie cummings

Hi, Dad
Dir. Joshua Pitney

I Choose Happiness
Dir. Peter Chambers

Kit
Dir. Lottie Amor

Language is Life
Dir. Stanko Pavlica

Making Contact
Anne Fife

One More Step
Dir. Alif Fauzan, Wahyu Juliansyah

Our Circle in the Storm
Ray Jacobs

Picture Girl
Simon Brown

SOUCE
Andrea Baglio

Sound Bites
Dir. Asha Oommen

Swanlake
Dir. Stella Traub

The Slam Dunk
Dir. Carlos Puig Mundó

The weight of blue
Dir. Fay Beck

Trading Cards
Dir. Radheya Jang

Unbound
Dir. Sara Nesson

When I Draw...
Dir. Runfeng Qiu

White Nine
Dir. Nilou Safinya

Short Film Competition History

A man hands a plaque to a smiling woman. Next to her are three people smiling and looking on, one sitting in a power chair, another holding a yellow flower. In 2007, CTD introduced the Student Film Competition to Cinema Touching Disability. In only a few years, it has become arguably the most popular element of the Festival! The vision behind the Competition is to encourage and empower emerging filmmakers to generate innovative film that addresses social, cultural, and personal perceptions about and experiences with disability. Volunteer judges select the first, second, and third place winners in both categories and a poll during the Festival determines the Audience Favorites. Winners enjoy cash and prizes, interviews with local media outlets, and a public screening of their film at the Festival. Right: CTD's Dennis Borel presents director Debbie Finley with the Grand Prize (Emerging Division) award for MIND OVER POLIO, a documentary featuring Charlotte Ferris (seated).

Six men, five college-age and one older, stand in a line holding up certificates, smiling broadly at the camera. The first year of the Competition, Josh Tate's FORGOTTEN LIVES, a highly acclaimed documentary about abuse of people with disabilities in state schools, took the Grand Prize (College Division).

Judge Chris Garcia, then a film critic for the Austin American-Statesman, called the film "truly eye opening and alarming...smartly and lucidly crafted." Left: Borel with the 2007 College division winners, Josh Tate, Sergio Carvajal, J. Anthony Hernandez, and others.

Zach Anner, a person with cerebral palsy featured in FORGOTTEN LIVES, went on to national stardom with his television show, The Real Zack Anner. Anner won a national competition for potential television show hosts, held by the Oprah Winfrey Network, but he started with Cinema Touching Disability!

Tate went on to win the 2015 Competition's Grand Prize (narrative division) with his short, GUEST ROOM, also an official selection at that year's SXSW Film Festival.

An older man speaking into a microphone hands a certificate to a younger man whose eyes are closed.

During the following few year years, the Competition began to receive more and more excellent films, many from local filmmakers and organizations. Some of our early Competition winners include the Capital Area Boy Scouts (2007), ADAPT of Texas (2008), and several area high school students. We also attracted the attention of young filmmakers from outside of Texas, like Drew Goldsmith, whose shorts have appeared on the PBS documentary series POV (2008, 2011), and students from the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts (2010). Right: Borel presents the 2008 Grand Prize (High School division) plaque to Michael Espinoza for his short "THE WAR TO END ALL WARS."

A man speaking into a tape recorder lounges on a bench, while the woman sitting next to him seems intrigued but hesitant. As the years have passed, Cinema Touching Disability has evolved the Competition to better suit our vision. For example, initially, the Competition was aimed at high school and college students, but in 2009, we opened it up to filmmakers of all ages. That year, we began to receive films from outside the United States, including Grand Prize winner (Emerging division), MON AMI CLAUDE, from Canada. With the incorporation of an online submission system a few years later, we saw increased participation from entrants all over the world. Now, filmmakers from outside the US routinely place as finalists or winners in our Competition. Grand prize winners in 2013 and 2014 for example, came all the way from Australia and Turkey, respectively. At our most recent Festival, winning entries arrived from the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia. Left (last one on this page): Still from 2013 Grand Prize winner and Audience Favorite "BE MY BROTHER, submitted by Genevieve Clay of Australia.

CTD is proud that our Short Film Competition not only has grown to allow us to share the best disability shorts in the world with our audience; it also draws international attention to Austin as a disability film hub.

The Cinema Touching Disability Short Film Competition is your opportunity to share your view of disability with our audience. We want interesting, imaginative, and creative representations of disability on film. All filmmakers, including professional, independent, amateur, secondary level school, and university students, are encouraged to submit their own representations of disability.