It’s a rare festival that includes one movie about amputee Devotees, let alone two, but Wide Angle Media isn’t your regular festival. Organized by Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture, WAM’s mandate is to bring media work by artists with disabilities to a wider audience while also promoting the presence of people with disabilities behind the camera. Devotees, meanwhile—to address the attention-getting device in the first sentence—are people who fetishize missing limbs, examined in this case by the films Vera Cam—Desireability Series, and My One Legged Dream Lover. It’s a bigger community than you probably think.

“While people historically I guess have been turned away from the sight of a person with a disability, especially any bare skin, there are in fact people—and I wouldn’t say all of them are fetishists—that find a kind of beauty, a sculptural beauty in bodies that are different,” says WAM co-curator Geoff McMurchy, talking to the Straight from his home in Victoria. “The possibility that people with disabilities can be considered beautiful exists.”

Perhaps a little less sensationally, the possibility that people with disabilities can make movies also exists. For the inaugural edition of the four-day festival—taking place at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, from tonight until Sunday (March 22 to 25)—McMurchy and his partners (including cofounders of the U.K.’s London Disability Film Festival Julie McNamara and Caglar Kimyoncu), have drummed up a whopping 30-plus shorts, running anywhere between five and 50 minutes.

WAM also commissioned works, granting $1,500 in starting funds and a $10,000 equipment package through William F. White International to five artists, including Jan Derbyshire and Matthew Kowalchuk. Kowalchuk’s film, Penguins (Are so sensitive to my needs), is already garnering an early buzz.

Significantly, while three of the commissioned films deal with disability issues, the others—including Laurence Cohen’s very intriguing sounding Will—don’t. Equally, the general program is not issue-focused.

“That was a decision that was made early on,” McMurchy explains, “that the films need to be made by a person with a disability, either written or directed, or have a very significant collaboration. But we did decide that they didn’t necessarily have to be about disability. Taking control of our own images and narratives is an important part of what Kickstart does, generally, but it’s not necessarily what we’re expecting this program to accomplish. It’s about levelling the playing field a little bit and giving filmmakers with disabilities the opportunities to create and present their work. Because, as you can guess, they’re vastly underrepresented in the film industry. “

To that end, WAM is also holding a number of workshops at the NFB during the course of the festival, covering topics that include funding, distribution, and creative writing. This is the kind of panel work that occurs at any film festival, except, as McMurchy points out, “people with disabilities historically haven’t had access to that information.”

“It’s pretty basic,” he says. “‘You’ve got a film, so now what?’ Or, ‘How to find the funding to make one.’ ”

Meanwhile, a brief look at the program is bound to pique the interest of any cinephile, with an especially strong bunch of films from the U.K. (William Mager’s Hands Solo and Deaf Mugger are both preceded by their reputations), and an animation “mini-fest” on Saturday (March 24).

For his part, McMurchy chooses The End when asked to recommend a personal favourite. Ted Evans’s 24-minute film posits a future where technology has eradicated deafness. “If it’s not explicit, it’s referring to the cochlear implant controversy,” the curator notes, adding that he’s well aware of the wider debate about the classification of deafness as a disability. (“I’m wondering if we’ll have a little bit of a backlash,” he says.)

That aside, the film focuses on the one child who refuses treatment. “By the end of the film he ends up being the last deaf person on Earth,” continues McMurchy. “He’s chosen to remain deaf because he’s comfortable with it. I just found it very thought-provoking.”