Ruth Madeley as disability rights activist Judith Heumann in the biopic Being Heumann, written and directed by Sian Heder. Photograph: Michael Gibson/Apple TV/AP View image in fullscreen Ruth Madeley as disability rights activist Judith Heumann in the biopic Being Heumann, written and directed by Sian Heder. Photograph: Michael Gibson/Apple TV/AP First look review Toronto film festival 2026 Review Being Heumann review – Coda director’s disability rights drama is well-intentioned but clunky Toronto film festival: the rousing story of Judith Heumann makes for obvious dramatic fodder and at times this biopic finds a rebellious groove but too much feels cut-and-paste
Prefer the Guardian on Google O n my way to Toronto, I wheeled my suitcase toward the taxi that would take me to the airport, finding the curb cut in the sidewalk so that my luggage could roll seamlessly down to the street. What a nice convenience provided by municipal governments all over the United States, one that so many of us take wholly for granted.
Read more But there was a fierce struggle for their existence, once deemed a radical, far too costly alteration to the nation’s infrastructure. (The same was argued about ramps and other means of accessibility.) They now exist ubiquitously across the country largely because of the tireless efforts of disability rights activists like Judith Heumann, one of the most prominent leaders of that cause from the 1970s until her death in 2023. Those who’ve seen Heumann in the Netflix documentary Crip Camp will remember her wit and tartness and zeal. That spark has now been bluntly captured in writer-director Sian Heder’s Being Heumann, a biopic covering the first major political act of Heumann’s long war on government indifference.
Being Heumann is Heder’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Coda , a film about a mixed family of deaf and hearing people significant in film history for centering disability so prominently and being handsomely rewarded for it. That is a woefully rare occurrence in Hollywood, though Coda (and its contemporary, Sound of Metal ) has had a noticeable impact on deaf representation on screen in the years since. Heder would thus seem the ideal steward for another film highlighting the lives and passions of physically marginalized people, who for so terribly long were essentially cut off from the rest of society because they lacked safe, proper access to public spaces.
In Being Heumann, Heder can’t invent a story wholesale, as she could with Coda. There is a historical record to follow. How closely must the facts be adhered to, and how much can you fudge for the sake of dramatic intrigue? Heder has about half shrewdly approached that difficult equation.
The middle stretch of the film is its strongest, covering the nearly month-long 1977 sit-in at the San Francisco office of the US health, education and welfare department. (That’s the agency, since renamed, now run by Robert F Kennedy Jr). Heumann leads that charge with stubbornness and ingenuity, and it’s a procedural lark seeing how her guerrilla protest plays out, rousing sympathy from the public and consternating government officials.
Here Heder applies the same tactic that worked in Coda, adding some sass and saltiness to further humanize characters (based, of course, on real people) who might otherwise only exist as pious avatars of identity. She lets the picture get shaggy, which appropriately captures the smoky, late-70s vibe of these hippy-ish protesters.…