'Being Heumann' Stages Two Heists: One Onscreen, One Behind the Camera

Siân Heder's new biopic Being Heumann is now streaming on Apple TV with 12 disabled lead actors and, at times, up to 60 disabled background performers — one of the largest ensembles of actors with disabilities in film history.

The film stars Ruth Madeley as Judy Heumann, the disability-rights pioneer known as the "mother of the disability rights movement." Rather than chronicling Heumann's entire life, Heder and co-writer Rebekah Taussig focus on April 1977 in San Francisco, where Heumann and a coalition of more than 100 disabled protesters staged the longest peaceful occupation of a federal building in U.S. history — a sit-in demanding enforcement of Section 504, the first federal law protecting against disability discrimination.

After 26 days, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano — played in the film by Mark Ruffalo — signed the Section 504 regulations, establishing enforceable federal protections and laying groundwork for the Americans With Disabilities Act, passed 13 years later in 1990.

What kind of film is it?

Not a reverent biopic, by the director's own account. Heder, who won the 2022 Oscar for CODA, frames the protest as a caper. "When I got to the section on the 504 [protest], I thought, 'Oh, this is Dog Day Afternoon with disabled people. This is a bank robbery with people who don't know how to rob a bank,'" she recalls.

Madeley puts it more directly: "This is a heist movie with a group of people who no one would expect to see in a heist movie. They weren't going in for money or jewels. They were going for their rights. It was so much more expensive and so much more precious."

The film opens in 1970s New York, with Heumann rolling her wheelchair down the middle of Madison Avenue — curbs are impassable, a bus driver leans on his horn — set to Iggy Pop's "The Passenger." "You are not introduced quietly to this character," Madeley says. "You literally meet her in utter chaos and noise. She's unfazed because she is doing that every damn day of her life."

The script does not sanitize her. Denied school until age nine because administrators called her wheelchair a fire hazard, Heumann later sued the New York Board of Education for the right to teach. She co-founded Disabled in Action in 1970. The film also shows her urging fellow activists into a hunger strike that their medical conditions made unwise.

"The title took on these other levels of meaning," Heder says. "Where it's as much about Judy having to learn how to be human as it is about her asking the world to treat this marginalized group of people as human."

What happened behind the camera?

A second revolution. Before her death in 2023, Heumann turned to Hollywood's record on disability representation. A 2019 Ford Foundation study she authored found that disabled people make up one in four of the population while media representation sits under three percent — and disabled roles, when they existed, went to non-disabled actors.

Heder blames part of the exclusion on industry mythology. "There's an ethos around filmmaking where you die for the movie, and it's like war, and it's a badge of honor that you can't walk at the end of every day," she says. "And what it's done is exclude a lot of really talented people who can't be on their feet for 14 hours."

The production ran a double operation: the art department filled in modern curb cuts to recreate inaccessible 1970s streets, while the accessibility team built ramps, installed lifts and modified trailers for the actual set. "To have accessibility completely cared for, I was able to show up every day as an actor, and I didn't realize how liberating that was," says Madeley, who uses a wheelchair.

The film's congressional testimony sequence merges reenactment with personal testimony. Heder interviewed each actor at a microphone in one long take — "one of the most powerfully cathartic experiences I've ever had on a set," she says. "We were allowing people who had been unseen and unheard to be centered."

Did the message land in Hollywood?

Not entirely. At the Los Angeles premiere at AFI Fest, the historic theater's stage and backstage proved inaccessible, barring cast members from appearing onstage and forcing the Q&A into the auditorium. Heder called it out publicly: "I had to say something because Judy would."

Madeley's closing argument is blunt: "Hollywood's all about world-building. We build buildings. We build car chases. We build things that we can set on fire. Things are done in the industry that are hard and expensive. Building a ramp is not that big of a deal. Hollywood, no more excuses. We've done it."

The stream debuts with optional onscreen ASL and BSL interpretation, directed by CODA and Being Heumann cast member Daniel Durant — a measure of how far accessibility can go when a production treats it as part of the build, not an afterthought.