Total Runtime: 47min <a href="https://www.restfestfilmfestival.org/spaces/routes-film-festival-program" target="_blank">﻿Click here to learn about each film in this program</a><a href="https://www.restfestfilmfestival.org/shorts-block-breath" target="_blank">.</a>

Content Notes: Description of car accident and severe injury and procedure Synopsis: Emerging from a single interview with Director Moya Bailey’s cousin Dollie Alexander, You Just Watch and See chronicles Dollie’s life from girlhood to achieving her twin dreams of becoming a professional woman and traveling the world. Artist Bio: Moya Bailey is a Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021). She is an award winning documentarian after completing the short documentary You Just Watch &amp; See(2025) featuring her late Cousin Dollie, and is completing a docuseries Misogynoir in Medicine. <a href="https://instagram.com/transformisogynoir" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@transformisogynoir</a> <a href="https://instagram.com/misogynoirinmed" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@misogynoirinmed</a> Online Premiere

description of car accident and severe injury and procedure

English

You Just Watch & See [AD] [CC]

Short documentary chronicles Dollie Alexander's life from girlhood to achieving her twin dreams of becoming a professional woman and traveling the world.

Synopsis: Going to school was hard for Angel. She was shy, quiet, and had not had a good handle on the English language yet. This stop-motion reveals all her childhood memories of school and everything in between. Artist Bio: Angel Yau is an award-winning comedian, storyteller, and filmmaker from Queens, New York. She founded Asian American Film Thing, a yearly screening celebrating all Asian American filmmakers and artists. She was recently featured in a BBC documentary about being a comedian dealing with anxiety and OCD. She also did a TEDx talk about comedy at Columbia University.Angel's stop-motion animations are where she explores her childhood in comedic but heartfelt ways, dealing with solitude, rejection, and alienation. <a href="https://www.angelyau.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.angelyau.com</a> <a href="instagram.com/yauangel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@yauangel</a> International Online Premiere

Extra Credit [AD] [CC]

An auto-biographical film about Angel Yau's childhood memories of (gulp) school.

Content Notes: Protest Synopsis: In Our Millions’ is a short film about Scottish solidarity with Palestine filmed during the November 11th protests. It is a Super8 film collaboratively shot and ecologically hand-processed over the course of a day as part of a workshop run by Lydia Beilby and Take One Action. Artist Bio: Meli Vasiloudes Bayada (she/her) is a Cypriot cultural worker, artist and filmmaker. Her work focuses on queerness, migration, post-colonialism, identity, and nation. As a geographer, she is interested in resurfacing objects and archives, challenging narratives and discourses, and decolonising art and culture. Her films have screened at Flatpack Festival (2025), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2025), Scottish Queer International Film Festival (2024), International Short Film Festival of Cyprus (2024, and 2025), and Take One Action (2023). Online Premiere

In Our Millions [AD] [CC]

A short film about Scottish solidarity with Palestine filmed during the November 11th protests.

Content Notice: The film contains some short scenes and rapid transitions Synopsis: “Aural Architecture” considers aural experiences originating in the mind communicated through sign language and voice. Those aural experiences (or aural gestalt) may represent either the real world or human imagination, expressed through multisensory modes and never emerging the same to everyone. This work challenges two of the biggest misconceptions about deafness and sound: that d/Deaf people live in silence and that only hearing people can access sound. Aurally diverse people embody sound in various ways: sonic, visual, tactile, and imagination. Whatever their divergent nature, aural gestalt may be properties that d/Deaf and hearing people have in common. “Aural Architecture” was inspired by 2013’s multisensory workshop in Sharjah by architect and designer Jeffrey Mansfield that investigates how “pure” sign language, which recreates the sensation of sound, allows us to listen visually. Artist Bio: Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. A neurodivergent, he works on aural diversity, disability, accessibility, and decolonizing the arts through multisensory and antidisciplinary practice, manifested in music-theater, film, installation, witty storytelling, and other genre-bending experiences. He is a 2024-25 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellow and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. @jay_afrisando (Instagram &amp; X) | https://www.jayafrisando.com/

The film contains some short scenes and rapid transitions

Aural Architecture [AD] [OC]

A video artwork considering aural experiences originating in the mind communicated through sign language and voice.

Synopsis: The film shows the embedded nature of everybody’s spatial voice in Taipei, produces a city that feels open, fronting the question: what would happen if disability were not included—embedded within all aspects of architectural practice. Contemporary architectural practice too often reduces disability to the technicalities of access—adding a ramp, a wider doorway, or an accessible restroom. These are gestures of compliance, not acts of imagination.&nbsp;Autistic Architectural Approach instead begins in disability—not as a constraint, but as a creative force. It proposes that architectural practice expand its sensory, cognitive, and social dimensions by opening itself to disabled ways of perceiving, organizing, and building space.—to open the architecture schools to disabled professors, lecturers, and students;—to open the studios and offices to disabled architects and collaborators;—to open hearts and minds to the recognition, as Eli Clare reminds us, that we are all, at best, temporarily non-disabled. Artist bio: Through his lens-based work, writing, and large-scale architectural works, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal (he/him/they) reassembles the world, enabling people to reflect on how they relate to it. Working highly interdisciplinary, he develops projects from idea, through concept, design, construction, and execution. Always with a keen sense for detail and tactility. His multifaceted background includes turning a key shop into a camera and a warehouse into a concrete workshop. In 2019, Troels learned that he is Autistic. He has since been examining the differences between explaining and exploring disability, bringing focus to our different ways of perceiving the world. He is developing an Autistic Architectural Approach, enabling all people to understand their impact and rights to the city. Troels has been an invited guest critic at Columbia GSAPP, Cornell University, RISD, The Cooper Union, and Tamkang University and helped found Arts, Letters, &amp; Numbers. He has worked, exhibited, and lectured in the US, Argentina, Colombia, Aruba, the Dominican Republic, and Denmark, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg and the Copenhagen Metro. He holds a Master of Arts in Architecture from Aarhus School of Architecture and a Bsc in Architectural Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark. Troels was born and raised in Toftlund (b. 1984), a Danish village of 3000, and is currently living in Taipei, Taiwan. Website: <a href="www.troelsheiredal.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.troelsheiredal.com</a> / IG: <a href="https://instagram.com/t.heiredal" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@t.heiredal</a> / bluesky: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/theiredal.bsky.social" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@theiredal.bsky.social‬</a> The film was first published by Brink Literary Journal.

English, Chinese

Not Included--Embedded [AD] [OC]

A documentary short film exploring the informal architectures of Taipei, seeing them as a representation of an Autistic Architectural Approach, which calls for disabled people to be—not included—embedded.

Content Notes: Flashing lights. Synopsis: What is alive in spaces left to re-wild? Dancers extend, gather &amp; throw their grief under late stage capitalism to move towards feeling for what is growing through the cracks. Artists Bios:Rae Grant Duff and Chantal Dobles Gering co-founded Shapeshifter Media Collective (est. 2022) which creates experimental short films and soundscores for theatrical and cinematic productions.Rae Grant Duff is an emerging independent filmmaker, musician and disabled trans writer based on the shared, unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.@shapeshiftermediacollective @raedicalphoenix International Premiere

before transforming we exist [AD] [OC]

Shorts Block: Spaces / Routes [AD] [CC]/[OC]

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We are honored to present 27 films/video artworks from Disabled, Deaf, chronically ill, Neurodivergent, and/or Mad artists. Click on a program below to get started. And we hope to see you at our Festival Events!

A virtual short film & video art festival created by/for the Disabled, Deaf, chronically ill, Neurodivergent, and/or Mad community. Entirely accessible from bed.

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