Accessing the Marginalized So We’re All Seen & Heard

Making a career pivot after 15 years in one job takes guts and some financial planning. Then add to the mix several disabilities and it sounds impossible. In this episode, host Sandra Abrams talks to filmmaker, advocate, and podcaster, Ariel Baska. Ariel shares how she made the leap to a new film career in a niche genre: Queer Horror, and founded the Access:Horror film festival. Ariel explains why inclusion in front of and behind the camera helps everyone on set, not just those with disabilities. She also gives us some insight on the Film Event Accessibility Scorecard.

For more information about Ariel, visit: https://arielbaska.com/
Find her podcast, Ride the Omnibus, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
To learn more about the Film Event Accessibility Scorecard, visit: https://feaw.org/
Learn more about Access:Horror at https://www.accesshorror.com/

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Transcript

00:01 - VO

Quiet on the set, all together, please, and action. 

00:10 - VO

Welcome to Media Monuments presented by Women in Film Video in Washington DC. Media Monuments features conversations with industry professionals speaking on a range of topics of interest to screen-based media makers. 

00:27 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

The drumbeat of inclusion and diversity of the underrepresented is finally being heard across the media landscape. I'm your host, sandra Abrams, and in this episode of Media Monuments I will speak to Ariel Basca, a filmmaker, podcaster and an advocate for the underserved and marginalized communities in the entertainment industry. Ariel is an award-winning multiple-disabled queer hard-documentary filmmaker. Her work has played on Alaska Airlines, at the Portland Art Museum and at film festivals from Berlin to Mexico City to Mumbai, and she is presented at the South by Southwest on the topic of disability and accessibility in the film and TV business. She's also the creator of AccessHara, a film festival and summit celebrating disability and horror. More importantly, ariel is a new Women in Film Video board member Welcome. And in a separate organization, she's on the committee that worked on the Accessibility Scorecard, a report that captures attendees' experience at film events. Welcome to Media Monuments and congratulations on all your success. 

01:47 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Oh, thank you so much, Sandra. It's delightful to be here. 

01:51 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

You describe yourself as a multiple-disabled person. Since people may not recognize or understand what that is, maybe if you could explain for our audience, to give them some background. 

02:03 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Sure, absolutely so. The reason why I describe myself as multiply disabled is a lot of the time, people identify themselves, you know, with one particular identity within the disability community, because I'm blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, I have a number of neurological conditions. I have, you know, one rare disease I was born with and three others I acquired in later life, and so I have a very complex picture in terms of, you know, my disability. You can't say you know there's a one-size-fits-all approach for anyone in the disability community, but especially for those of us who are multiply disabled, because we have multiple things that are going to make our accommodations look very, very different from anyone else in the community. 

02:59 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

I think that gets back to what I saw on your mission website that every person deserves to see themselves, and that's something that you definitely speak to. Is that something that you came about and said, all right, I've met all these people, or what brought you to that viewpoint? 

03:16 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Honestly, you know the project I'm working on right now. I'm working on a documentary about my relationship to the horror genre as a whole, which evolved really from seeing Freddie Kruger on screen at age three. I saw Freddie Kruger as a disfigured child and I was like that's me and that's representation that nobody would intentionally say oh, I'm writing this with three-year-old kids in mind, but it was representation that I felt reflected who I am. But that's also a problem, because there was nothing authentic out there. There was nothing that was written by a disabled person for a disabled audience, with a disabled cast, that I could actually watch on screen anywhere. And so it was in horror that I found my tribe of people. And I'm not saying that horror isn't a fabulous community, because it definitely is. It's where I find community and connection. But it's this representation gap that exists in media that I think creates a sense of loss and a sense of something that is ultimately missing and that is where underserved and ignored populations. 

04:41 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

I think that's great, that you saw an opportunity and said, okay, this is where I'm going to focus, but also focus on it because I feel like I'm accomplishing other goals in doing that as well that are meaningful to the, and being able to incorporate people from all walks of life. I think that's very meaningful. So I wanted to because that was one of my questions why the horror genre? I'm not a big fan of the horror genre, but one of the other co-hosts, tara Jabari, is, and so I said, oh, this is going to be a challenge for me because this is it so, but I'm learning a lot, so that's wonderful. 

05:22

I wanted to circle back with you on that, something that we had chatted about before, of how you actually got into this industry, because you haven't really been in this industry very long and it actually was a career switch. You pivoted from something else and I thought that's a wonderful lesson for so many people that they can make career changes. Maybe if you could just talk a little bit about what brought you to the filmmaking and the television industry and screen-based media. 

05:51 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Yeah, absolutely. So brief disclosure for 15 years I was a Latin and theater teacher. I absolutely loved those subjects, and I taught middle school and high school students for 15 years in that role and I felt like it was the thing I was meant to be doing, the thing I was called to do, really truly a vocation. But my disabilities became so overwhelming in terms of my symptoms, that I could no longer actually sustain working for a full eight hour day anymore, and so, basically, I was pushed out of teaching, essentially, and I sat alone at home for a year and a half. No, I mean, it was a situation where people with disabilities don't like to be thought of as being isolated and alone at home, but I was in this period of rebirth that I had to go through. There was a clear generative cycle that I had to go through, where I had to reckon with what my identity really is, because I had never really acknowledged myself as being disabled until this happened. And then, all of a sudden, I'm told, no, you need to be on short-term disability. And no, you can't work. And therefore, ok, I guess I'm disabled and I have all this internalized ableism that I have to figure out somehow. And after about a year and a half of sitting and acknowledging these emotions, I finally felt ready to go. 

07:49

And then the pandemic hit, and so it was March of 2020. And I was like you know what I'm sick of this? I'm going to create a podcast because I want to actually talk to people in the community about the things that really matter to them, and so my idea was to start a podcast around the theme of pop culture and social justice. So that's Ride the Omnivus, my podcast, and I started talking to friends who are artists in different kinds of spaces musicians, filmmakers. Once I started talking to filmmakers, I was like you know what? It doesn't seem that hard to make a movie. Like, if they can do it, so can I. God damn it. I was so naive, but I think you have to choose to become a part of this industry, really truly. 

08:47 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

And right, it's better off. You're better off If I know now that you probably would not have taken the first step. So you're better off. 

08:58 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Absolutely. But the thing is right around the same time, I was actually told that I had to have brain surgery. So I had actually gotten the news that I had four aneurysms in my brain in addition to this very rare disease, and I had to have brain surgery. And I seriously thought, after the news that I got about the four aneurysms, I was going to die on the operating table. And I was like now or never, it's do or die, let's just do this. 

09:36

So I raised $20,000 on Kickstarter, having never made a movie before. Like, granted, I've written books, I've done a lot of things, but I'd never made a movie before. And so somehow, people, you know, were totally willing to open their hearts to me and their pocketbooks and I'm so grateful for that and I assembled a team of really incredible people who came together to work on our first priority, which was a film that I wrote while I was waiting for brain surgery, about medical gaslighting. I basically send a doctor to hell for telling a patient it's all in her head, and it was something I felt very passionate about at the time. I felt passionate about it when I was a kid. I feel passionate about it now. I don't think that's ever going to change. 

10:33

But it's interesting because it was very much from a revenge point of view that I created this narrative and I was so sure I was gonna die on the operating table that I threw all my energy into it. Every day on set I was having horrible migraines, because one of the conditions that I have also means I have chronic migraines, so I was literally experiencing a migraine a day and they wouldn't respond to medication in any way, shape or form. But it meant that we were coming up with really unique set practices, too, to create accessibility on set in the same way. And so, even though it was my first project and the first short film I'd ever done, it was enormously successful because everybody was so aligned in terms of the energy of the project, was all so focused. It was incredible, and it went on to win the advocacy award from Superfest Disability Film Festival. It's playing on Alaska Airways now. 

11:42 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Oh, congratulations. Thank you and what's the name of the film? Our first priority. Is there anything else that you're planning as you're putting into more film festivals? Put it up on a streaming service, anything like that that you can share with our audience. 

11:57 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Yeah, so it's actually playing at OSCA Bright in Brighton, england, on March 18th, I believe, and so, because of that film festival and Alaska Airways, I'm debating where I'm going to distribute it online. At this point I haven't quite settled on exactly where it's going to land, but it will be landing soon. I'm also hoping to have a little bit of an impact campaign, talking to medical students about the film and how to not be sent to hell, basically. 

12:35 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Well, one of the things that you said you raised all this money, you threw yourself into this film, yet you were dealing with other medical issues at the same time. How quickly did you film? And then, because it sounds like you were filming it before you went into the surgery, can you talk a little bit about that timeline? 

12:52 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Oh my gosh, that timeline was a little silly, if I'm honest, and very naive of me, but I threw myself into it. I started working on the script in March. We shot it in July over a period of five days. We literally got the money from Kickstarter the week that we started filming and it was on the festival circuit premiering in Berlin in February, and so we had a very, very quick production schedule on that shoot and I've been doing a lot of work since then. That's been at a very accelerated pace. So, even though technically I didn't actually make anything if you wanna call the process of production the making July of 2021 was when I started in this business and even though technically I've only been in it two and a half years, I've made a lot of mistakes and I have made a lot of work. 

14:00 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

So I think a lot of people would say once they start in this industry, they make a lot of mistakes, but I think that's also a great way to learn and figure out what to do right. So I think you're doing exactly what best practice and best experience you can have Make those mistakes, talk to other people and then just turn around and figure out what's how to make it better for the next time, and that's a great lesson. 

14:24 - Arail Basca (Guest)

It is such a great lesson and I really feel like it is the best film school to just jump in and make a lot of mistakes and see what you learn, and it's been so powerful for me to be working in horror and documentary and seeing that a lot of the same pitfalls befall both genres too, so it's quite remarkable. 

14:49 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

And I don't wanna pry on your personal health, but I just wanted to just check, make sure you're okay any future surgeries, anything that you can I mean, obviously you're okay because we're talking, but anything that you feel comfortable sharing. 

15:07 - Arail Basca (Guest)

I mean, I will just be frank. I am a person with disabilities and chronic illness, so I will never be perfect, but in general I would say my health is certainly much calmer now after brain surgery than it was before. Not only did I survive the brain surgery, it kind of gave me my life back and allowed me to actually pursue things that I love. Not that I can actually pursue teaching again. I will never be able to sustain the same kind of work I did before, but I'm absolutely, you know, a committed member of the filmmaking community now and I am very devoted to figuring out new and unique ways of making work happen. 

16:05 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Well, let's talk about that some more, especially when it comes to the production side of it. What is it that production teams should know or do, or what skills should they have? Casting directors, directors, anything that you can offer as far as what you've learned, especially when it comes to the disability community, in order to open up more opportunities for marginalized communities. 

16:30 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Absolutely. First of all, the thing I would say is that for casting directors, writers, et cetera, no matter who you are, you deserve to be seen on screen. When you think about the fact that pre-COVID, 26% of adults have disabilities, that's just people who have the privilege of diagnosis. We know that diagnosis is a privilege because of so many factors. When we talk about the modern world 26% of Americans before COVID. After COVID, which is a mass disabling event, it's probably closer to one in three, if I'm honest. Think about stories that actually reflect the world we live in. Think about how many times on screen you actually see characters with disabilities that are played authentically. 

17:34

One of the things that I think has been most powerful for me has been working with organizations like Forward Dock on different initiatives. 

17:47

It's filmmakers with disabilities in documentary, but also beyond documentary, just in the film world in general. One of the things that I think they do so well and so powerfully when we're thinking about disabilities on screen is educating people on how to incorporate access into what they do and to best practices on set and making sure that people are actually coming up with ways to recognize the power structures on set and have a person they can talk to about accommodations, that is not the person who writes the paycheck. I think those power imbalances are so pronounced that people below the line are terrified to talk to people above the line about what they really need. I've found that providing access on set improves everyone's experience, not just the people who identify as disabled. It helps everyone check in to say what they need, what their needs are from minute to minute. I know so many people whose practices have changed just because of being on set with me at one point or another. 

19:10 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

So you've been on set and you've been able to help people navigate this particular issue. 

19:15 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Yes, it's so powerful, I think, too, for people to see someone with disabilities on set who's openly willing to say that. Not everyone in this industry is openly willing to say that they have disabilities, because so many of us fear prejudice and exclusion for good reason. But I think it's so important. 

19:40 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

So it sounds like things are changing now for the better and everyone's benefiting from that. Absolutely, that's wonderful to hear. Is there anything as far as you want to say what happens on your own set that you're instituting based on what you have learned? 

19:59 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Yeah, so on my own sets, one of the biggest things for me has been to hire a production accessibility coordinator. That is, one person who is kind of the point person who coordinates all of the needs that people have on set, no matter who they are or what those needs are. They could be bio breaks, they could be a need to haul a particular thing, it could be I have a small child that I need to figure out how to pump in the corner somehow, or is there a space that we can set aside that makes sense for this? It's really important to have someone on set who's specifically looking at those questions, because it improves everything about the workflow of any given project. It's not just about people with disabilities, it's about people with needs, which is, frankly, all of us. That's been really essential. 

21:01

The other thing is planning sets around who we actually have on our team. It's generally a good idea to have a baseline of accessibility that you provide, but that's not always possible. There was a set that I was working on where I specifically had to have people come up two flights of stairs. I was like, oh my gosh, I feel so terrible that this is not an accessible set. Then I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, but I don't have any wheelchair users in this group. I'm the person it affects most and I still need to shoot in this space because it's a beautiful space. But I should be planning around the people I do have on set the people with chronic illness, the people with blindness and just making sure that I'm looking carefully at how those things play out on set, as opposed to what everybody assumes, which is a white man in a wheelchair. 

22:08 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

You're going, it's taking more planning, and that's the thing that people need to be mindful of. It's not just okay, we're going to do a movie. You have to be more mindful of the planning, but it will benefit everybody. 

22:21 - Arail Basca (Guest)

It really does benefit everybody in the long run. It's pay me now or pay me later, and it costs a lot less if you pay now. 

22:32 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

I wanted to pivot a little bit from talking about the production to actually talking about the audience, because you had mentioned that you were on this committee with the accessibility scorecard. I wanted to ask you about that because I think our audience, especially media makers, it will find it very insightful and I just want to add a little context here. It's the Film Event Accessibility Scorecard and that was developed to capture the experiences of attendees at film events, particularly through the accessibility lens. So maybe you can talk a little bit how you got involved with the committee and anything that you can share about this initiative with the report. I think it should be coming out soon. 

23:12 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Yeah, it's actually coming out. In January We'll be announcing the Scorecard Impact Report and delivering, you know, some presentations on that at Slamdance, actually in January. But FEAWorg and forwarddoc FWD-DOCorg are the two organizations that came together really to create the accessibility scorecard to begin with. Particularly, it's because so many festivals exclude disabled filmmakers, either intentionally or unintentionally it's sometimes really hard to say but one of the things that we have seen is that most spaces designed for film don't have accessibility in mind, and so we created the accessibility scorecard as a place where people could go and report exactly what they experienced at different festivals. So it has a very quick list of checkboxes where you can check. You know, did this festival have open captioning? Did this festival have closed captioning? Was there ASL available? Was there someone I could talk to about my accommodation needs? I would say that that is the most essential question that a lot of festivals really fail at instituting. 

24:45

I became involved with the scorecard specifically because I had a film festival that I ran this past summer called Access Horror, about disability and horror, and I was really interested in creating access in really creative ways, and so I had an Access Producer in addition to my other two producers, and it was completely run online using American Sign Language for every session, etc. And it's really wonderful when you can do that with disabled filmmakers in mind, but it shouldn't have to be a disability-focused festival for you to actually create spaces that are comfortable and accessible and inclusive. So the accessibility scorecard really takes the framework of every festival could be doing these things and you can use it as a checklist of things that you could potentially try to incorporate into your festival if you wanted to. But you could also take the scorecard and the data that we've gotten from that scorecard from the last year and some change really gives a good roadmap for where we need to go, and I'm afraid I can't say anything about the roadmap yet, but come January I'll be able to talk all about it, right? 

26:13 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Well, you just heard it here, folks, you need to look for this accessibility scorecard in January and then circle back with Ariel, so then she can follow and she will be happy to answer your questions. 

26:25 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Well, you can check out the scorecard anytime. Right now it's at FEAWorg and you can find the scorecard as it is. It's just the impact or report that we have to kind of wait, but we will be releasing that as well as a case study on how festivals are improving based on the information they've received as feedback from the scorecard, because festivals sign up to receive the feedback for everything that participants are actually experiencing at their festival. So there have been several festivals that have gone through this process and actually found, hey, we could be doing this so much more cheaply and easily if we just accommodated this thing over here and we gave people a place to go for this thing over here and then found a year later that their scores, their feedback, was much, much happier in the end. 

27:25 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

That's such insightful information I believe our audience is really going to benefit from. So at the beginning of our interview you mentioned that you were working on a new project. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that and what's your expectation as to when that's coming out? 

27:42 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Sure so Monstrous. Me is my current documentary project, and it's fundamentally, at its heart, a reckoning between me and the cinematic monsters that inspired me throughout my life, and it starts with Freddie Krueger At age three, at age three. 

28:04 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Freddie Krueger, that's great. 

28:07 - Arail Basca (Guest)

And the question of do I have to be a monster or a martyr to fit in, and I decided ultimately that there was agency in being monstrous, so I would much rather that. So that was my decision that I made at age three, but the documentary as a whole is shaped by how I think about myself in relationship to these wonderful characters from horror that I viewed in different kinds of ways as I was reckoning with my disability, specifically in 2020, but also, as a child, how I felt about disability and ableism and what made me reject being associated with that community so strongly for so long. And so it's really important to me that films like this exist and have a place to thrive, because they're about this representation gap, because we want to be able to see the actual world around us and not some simulacrum that doesn't reflect where we are. 

29:21 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

That's gets back to what you were saying about your mission statement that everybody has a right to be seen and heard. So I wanted to ask if there was anything else that you wanted to add to our chat today that maybe I haven't asked, that you think it's important for the audience to know. 

29:39 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Well, I do think that it's really important for the audience to know that Hades Town is my favorite musical at the moment. I actually just saw that in New York on Broadway for the first time on Friday. But I also think it's important to know that when we talk about film festivals and the things that go bump in the night and all of these things, really the thing that is ultimately most important is a willingness to change, because the willingness has to come before anything else can happen, and so it's not about money. People always think it's about money when you talk about accessibility, and it's really not that, because ultimately, you can create a lot of access for no money or minimal money, but if you don't have the willingness, nothing's going to change. 

30:44 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Thank you, Ariel, for chatting with Media Monuments. For more information her website is ariobaskacom, and the accessibility scorecard that's going to be released in January, the website for that is. 

31:00 - Arail Basca (Guest)

Well, you can find that at feaworg. So that's the Film Event Accessibility Working Group website. 

31:07 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

But yes, and then I wanted to say also Arrows. Instagram has pictures of wonderful cats. It's kind of like an orange tabby. 

31:17 - Arail Basca (Guest)

So your Instagram address is Just ask Abaska, just ask Abaska, just to kind of coach people in how to spell my name Wonderful. 

31:30 - Sandra Abrams (Host)

Thank you again so much. Thank you so much. This has been lovely. 

31:34 - VO

Thank you for listening to Media Monuments, a service of women in film and video. Please remember to review, rate and subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. For more information about WIF, please visit our website at wwwwifasenfrancvasenfictororg. Media Monuments is produced by Sandra Abrams, candace Block, brandon Ferry and Tara Jabari and edited by Emma Klein, with Audio Production and Mix by Steve Lack Audio. For more information about our podcast, visit mediaandmonumentscom.