The last time Siân Heder took a film to a festival, the year was 2021 and the festival was a largely virtual, Covid-era Sundance. The film was “CODA,” which landed a record deal with Apple TV, won the audience and the jury awards and went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, knocking off Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” which had been considered the frontrunner for months.
This time around, the Heder film is “Being Heumann,” the festival is Toronto and the deal with Apple is already in place. The new film can’t be the kind of underdog that “CODA” was, but it can be the same kind of movie: TheWrap called “CODA” “modest but thoroughly satisfying, corny but effective, never edgy and always likable,” and it’s safe to say that “Being Heumann” is more ambitious, just as satisfying, a little less corny, equally effective, occasionally edgy and, of course, very likable.
A story from the life of Judy Heumann, a disability rights activist who led a 26-day sit-in in 1977 to protest the government’s failure to enact 1973 legislation, the film is focused on one woman and one specific struggle, but it gains strength from the way it reverberates in many directions. As Heder said when she introduced the movie before its premiere in the Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre, it is debuting in an era in which “a lot of people are being left behind,” and so many battles for justice are being waged on so many different fronts that you can wonder if organized protest even matters.
Beyond that, “Being Heumann,” to an even greater extent than “CODA,” may be as important for the way in which it was made, and for the fact that it was made to begin with, than for whatever Cinemascore or RottenTomatoes score it receives. As a 2026 movie that centers disability rights and features a cast of disabled actors, its quality is significant but so is its existence.
The film is based on Judy’s autobiography, “Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist,” and on the sit-in protest that was featured in the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” which traced the roots of the movement to Camp Jened, a New York summer camp for disabled children. Heumann was in many ways the hero of that film – but the remarkable thing about British actress Ruth Madeley’s performance is that she makes us embrace a character so “unrepentant,” as Heumann said in her book title, that even her friends and supporters announce that she’s an a—hole. When Heumann admits as much to valued aide Kitty Cone late in the film, Cone replies simply, “Yeah, but you’re the a—hole we needed.”
And Madeley is the actress that “Being Heumann” needed, giving us a character who is fiery and flawed and exasperatingly unrelenting, because maybe that’s what it takes to unstick a piece of legislation that’s been dormant for more than half a decade because nobody thinks the government can afford to make buildings, jobs and schools accessible to the disabled. Madeley is surrounded by a gifted cast of disabled actors, among them Madeline Delp as Cone, Michael Patrick Thornton as Ed Roberts, the first wheelchair user to attend Berkeley, and Antwan Tolliver as Brad Lomax, a former Black Panther who had multiple sclerosis.
Unlike “CODA,” which used Emilia Jones’ character, Ruby, as an audience surrogate and a way into the family in which Ruby is the only hearing member, “Being Heumann” exists largely within the world of the disabled; Mark Ruffalo plays recalcitrant secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano and insists he’s not the bad guy (sorry, he pretty much is) and Dylan O’Brien plays a TV reporter who goes from being uncomprehending to becoming an ally of Heumann and crew — but the focus is on, to use a term that Judy embraces though it wouldn’t be accepted today, the “army of cripples.”
With only a little bit of setup, the film zeroes in tightly on that army and its 26-day occupation at the HEW offices in San Francisco. Rather than giving us significant backstory, Heder puts us in that building and keeps us there for most of the movie as Heumann & Co. figure out how to make sleeping arrangements, how much nutrition they can get from the vending machines and how long they can hold out while being harassed by police and deprived of working phone lines.
It’d be exhausting if it weren’t also pretty funny at times (FYI, there’s a “sex tent” in one room, which is pretty much what it sounds like). The film can be melodramatic; it can stop for speechmaking, with an array of testimonials at a makeshift congressional hearing being particularly grueling and potent; and it can find room for comedy and for needle-drops of songs both appropriate (the Ramones’ “Judy Is a Punk,” Parliament’s “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)”) and appropriate but anachronistic (Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime”).
You pretty much know it’s going to get triumphant, at least to some degree, and Heder knows how to work triumph on screen. There’s no question that she’s pulled off another crowd-pleasing film, but the key to “Being Heumann” is that its importance goes beyond those audience smiles.
“Being Heumann” will be released in select theaters on Nov. 6 and on Apple TV on Nov. 13.
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