Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Sian Heder, director of Being Heumann, joins Dr. Victor Pineda to talk about bringing disability rights icon Judy Heumann’s story — and the 504 Sit-In — to the screen.

Sian reflects on why she chose this project after winning her Oscar for CODA, the responsibility of representing a historic civil rights movement accurately, and why she built the film around an ensemble of real figures — Brad Lomax, Kitty Cone, Ed Roberts, and others — rather than a single-hero narrative. She and Victor dig into the “dark night of the soul” moments inside the sit-in, her research process rebuilding CIL’s offices down to the paperwork on the desks, and the accessibility barriers she had to solve just to get the film made (Hollywood, she notes, had never built an accessible trailer before this production). The conversation closes with why this story feels urgent right now, as disability rights face renewed threats.

This episode is a reminder that a movement isn’t the story of one person, but of the people who came together to meet the moment — and Being Heumann is a call to join them.