As many of you will have seen, the BAFTAs was on this week. Now I’m no film connoisseur but I enjoyed seeing what up coming films had won. Around halfway through watching, I realised something that really changed the way I looked at that industry, there were no physically disabled actors, directors or any other roles. As a young, disabled, aspiring actor, it was disheartening for me to see that there was nobody in that massive selection of films that represented any kind of physical disability.
There’s of course been fabulous change and amazing progress in the BAFTAs with the amount of female directors and producers. There’s also been much needed change in the amount of racial diversity in the industry, but there’s still a long way to go there as well. Noel Clark did a speech at the end of the programme, he spoke about diversity and change. “This is for the underrepresented” it was a very powerful thing to say. My question though is, how are things actually going to change?. Inspiring speeches are great but inspiring speeches alone don’t make change.
In 2019 the BAFTAs introduced a diversity and inclusion criteria into the eligibility requirements for their awards, this meant films must have worked to increase the representation in at least two of the four following areas:
• On screen representation, themes and narratives
• Project leadership and creative practitioners
• Industry access and opportunities
• Opportunities for diversity in audience development.
But is this truly enough? Their diversity policies are definitely helping them to make huge progress but currently the representation being shown isn’t at the standard it should be at. There needs to be more change, physically disabled people need to be shown as capable and successful in all mainstream media, casting directors must start taking time to understand disability in all its forms and disabled people must be listened to when they say that they feel underrepresented.