Heder's 'Being Heumann' Opens TIFF, First Since CODA — SkimNews
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- Siân Heder's "Being Heumann" opened the Toronto International Film Festival, her first feature since 2021's "CODA," and is cast entirely with disabled actors playing disabled characters.
- The film dramatizes the 1977 Section 504 sit-in at the San Francisco HEW building, a 21-day occupation the source identifies as the longest sit-in in U.S. history.
- Judy Heumann, played by Ruth Madeley, leads the protest; the source frames the casting as a deliberate rebuke to audience habits of defining people by their disabilities.
- Mark Ruffalo plays HEW Secretary Joseph Califano under President Carter, who refuses to sign Section 504 into law, citing a cost of $2.4 billion in 1977 dollars — which the source reads as coded reluctance to spend on "those people."
- Black Panther Brad Lomax (played by Antwan Tolliver) joins the protest; his Panther comrades deliver food to sustain the demonstrators through Judy Heumann's hunger strike.
- The film closes on the observation that the disability-rights revolution remains unfinished: the Americans with Disabilities Act wasn't signed into law until 1990, 13 years after the sit-in depicted.
Why it matters: By casting disabled actors and dramatizing how a self-described civil-rights ally like Califano refused to sign Section 504 over cost concerns for "those people," Heder extends the representational breakthrough of "CODA" while making a pointed argument that disability rights — unlike other 20th-century rights movements — remain a contested, unfinished project.
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