Film comp to shine a light on disability

Published 5:00pm 15 November 2022

Having won a film competition with a five-minute clip that highlighted the difference of how a disabled and able-body person complete their every day tasks, Lenny Seberry is now challenging others in the community to do the same.

Lenny, who has his own production company in Beachmere, has launched his own short film competition where he challenges support workers, family and friends to spend a day in the life of someone they know who has a disability.

Lenny says the friendly competition is his way of shining a spotlight on disability and getting people to understand how hard life can be for some people.

“We tend to look at people with a disability and treat them as if they are fragile and never ask them any questions,” Lenny says.

“But what we need to do is look past the wheelchairs and that person’s disability and really see that person for who they truly are.

“We want this competition to be a way for support workers, family and friends to share the stories of their loved ones.

“The more creative people can be in getting their stories and messages across, the better.

“We don’t care about the technical side of things – you can film your video on an iPhone if you want.”

Helping Lenny with the competition is his good friend Nathan Tessman, also known as MC Wheels. MC Wheels is a Sunshine Coast rap artist who was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy with Respiratory Distress.

Lenny has been working with MC Wheels for roughly 10 years now and films all his music videos.

MC Wheels and his support worker Rachel Westby starred in Lenny’s film that won the Judge’s Choice Award at the NOVA Employment 2022 Focus On Ability Short Film Awards gala evening in October.

“We were really quite humbled to have won that award,” Lenny says.

“It was a fun story for us to do, and with the amount of people that thought it was a cool idea, we wanted to keep this momentum going and that’s when we came up with the idea for our own film competition,” Lenny says.

“We would love for this to go viral and welcome as many people as possible to enter.”

You can see Lenny’s winning video here for inspiration.

MC Wheels will be picking the winners of this competition, with first prize being $650.

The video that receives the most votes from the public will win $350.

Three runner ups will also receive signed albums by MC Wheels.

All the videos will be uploaded to Lenny’s website where people can click, view, share and vote for their favourite.