To mark Five Films for Freedom 2026, Michael Blyth spoke to the team behind the film Rag Dolls: director Amy Adler, producer Valeria López, and executive producer Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez.
For all contemporary cinema’s claims to inclusivity, disabled lives are still rarely centred on screen. And when disability is represented, it is all too often filtered through an ableist lens, framed as inspirational, heroic or tragic. Add queerness to the equation, and the space for representation narrows further still.
Rag Dolls offers something different.
Directed by Amy Adler, who also co-produces with Valeria López, the documentary short follows married couple Rosalinda, born with spina bifida, and Diana, who has cerebral palsy, over the course of a single day in Puebla, Mexico. While the film does not shy away from the structural barriers they navigate (from inaccessible infrastructure and economic precarity to homophobia and social prejudice), Rag Dolls is not an issue-driven work. Instead, it centres the everyday acts of intimacy, love and mutual care that shape their lives. By acknowledging hardship without allowing it to drive the story, the film stands apart in a cinematic landscape that so often defines disabled lives by struggle. It is this quietly radical perspective that makes Rag Dolls such a fitting choice for Five Films For Freedom 2026, the British Council and BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival initiative that makes five queer short films available to audiences worldwide, free to stream during the festival’s 12-day period.
The project began with the director’s brother, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez (also an executive producer), who had known Diana for many years. Both wheelchair users with cerebral palsy, they first met through a physical rehabilitation programme in Cuernavaca before reconnecting when Ekiwah returned as a poetry teacher, and Diana became his student.
“Then a few years later, I got this notice on my Facebook wall that my friend and student was missing,” Ekiwah recalls. “And then three weeks later, another notice appeared from her mother saying she was found.” When he finally reached Diana directly, however, she had a different story. “She answered and said, ‘I haven’t disappeared. I’ve never been more found in my life. I fell in love with another woman in a wheelchair, and my mother will not accept this.’”
For Ekiwah, that moment set a creative process in motion. “I was so compelled by that story that I thought, I have to make a podcast,” he says. “Amy jumped right on board. We met with Diana and Rosalinda in a hotel in Puebla, and their story unfolded from there.”
Upon meeting the couple, Amy and her wife Allyson (who is also the film's composer and executive producer) felt an instant connection. “We immediately bonded on the level of being queer women,” the director explains. “We just had this queer kinship, giggling and fun, and we became very close friends.” That friendship deepened over the years. “I consider them part of my extended family,” she adds. “This film is part of a continuum of a relationship, rather than a transactional meeting.”
Co-producer Valeria emphasises how that closeness shaped the film’s point of view. “Amy and Ekiwah allow for the participants to actually tell their own story”, she explains. “They are observers, as opposed to people who scrutinise them.” The result is clear: “Rosalinda and Diana are the ones really leading the charge.”
Ekiwah understands implicitly why that distinction is so important. “When you have a disability, it can be easy to be reduced to a person in a wheelchair,” he says. “But really, we all have a story to tell. In their case, it’s their love story. The film is a hymn to love… a hymn to devotion.” And for Ekiwah, one particular moment in the film captures that sentiment so perfectly: “Two women… pushing each other across the street in their wheelchairs… is such a metaphor for devotion and for endurance.”
If the film is to reflect the reality of their lives, it has to move at their pace. One particular sequence, which shows the pair getting changed, unfolds slowly, the camera patiently observing as Rosalinda and Diana prepare for the day. “We chose to stay on certain moments,” Amy explains. “Like when she’s changing her sweatshirt, to really emphasise the actual time of their daily lives. That was one part of how to tell the story authentically, without racing through it.”
That commitment to authenticity demanded equal attention to boundaries. “We wanted to show the way they care for each other… but we absolutely did not want to cross a line of being invasive to their privacy,” Amy says, describing that boundary as something that hit her physically: “I could feel it in my body when it was not something that needs to be on film.”
Beyond matters of intimacy, the filmmakers were equally attuned to wider questions of authorship and power. Amy is explicit about her own positionality. “I’m a white person. I’m non-disabled,” she says. “I have resources and privilege, so I had to constantly be checking in with that.” Consent, in this context, was never treated as a one-off formality but as an ongoing process. “All the decisions were discussed with them very closely,” she continues. “We took the time to explain every decision. No moves are made without their consent.”
Language, too, formed part of that ethical framework. Amy, not a perfect Spanish speaker, is acutely aware of the potential imbalance that can create. “Sometimes Ekiwah translated, sometimes technology did,” she explains. “Sometimes it was just about slowing down and making sure everything was really understood.” The aim, she asserts, was to avoid assuming consent simply because participants appeared agreeable. Instead, it had to be “concrete” and “repeated”, something fully understood, not merely implied.
As the team prepares for the film to reach wider audiences, the conversation shifted to aftercare - how to keep Rosalinda and Diana informed, in control and safe, particularly with regard to their visibility as queer women. In the film, they explain how they sometimes tell people they are sisters or cousins to keep themselves safe, a small but telling detail that highlights the risk that comes with being open about their relationship where they live. Valeria explains that this reality led to the creation of a kind of ‘consent calendar’, with built-in milestones to ensure that “all the press, everything that is being said and everything that is being discussed is still… something they’re comfortable with.” This framework was especially important when the opportunity to submit the film to a festival in Puebla presented itself. “We were very careful before we did,” Amy explains, “because we needed to make sure that not only were they okay with that, but that the final decision was theirs.”
Such ethical considerations exist within a much longer history of exclusion. As Ekiwah points out, “Until recently in Mexico, disabled people didn’t have the legal right to be identified as individuals capable of making their own decisions. We didn’t have that right to marry or to hold a piece of property.” Their relationship, he adds, is situated “in a much wider context of disability justice, and of justice for queer lesbian women… where often they cannot live their own decisions and their intimacy freely.” It is precisely because of that history, and the structural barriers that have worked against them, that their voices cannot be peripheral in a film that tells their story. Ensuring they have meaningful creative control, both during production and beyond, is not simply good practice. It is essential.
Valeria hopes the film will draw attention to the ways in which exclusion is built into the everyday environment. She points to a moment when the couple approach a shop and are stopped by a small step at the entrance. “Just the fact that there’s a slight elevation change completely changes whether or not they can actually enter the store,” she notes. “There is no reason for that little extra step there.” It is a minor architectural detail, yet one that exposes how exclusion is often structural rather than personal. “It’s not putting the onus on the disability itself,” Valeria says. “It’s the societal constraints.”
She also notes how employment discrimination and limited accessibility make it difficult to build support networks or maintain independence. “We want to build community for them,” she says, “and hopefully help build some sort of support system.” And that intention has already taken tangible form. Through the project, Ekiwah notes, practical support has been possible alongside visibility. “We’ve started a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for them,” he says, “we want to help them with basic living expenses and their dream of long-term stable housing, as well as helping connect them to local resources.”
Valeria emphasises that Rag Dolls is not the final chapter in Rosalinda and Diana’s story. “This short film is actually a companion piece to a larger narrative feature film that we’ve been working on and developing,” she explains. “That’s where we’re going to tell the full story — how they met, what they went through, the aftermath.” From podcast to short documentary to narrative feature, the commitment remains constant: long-term collaboration, sustained trust, and the belief that Rosalinda and Diana’s story deserves to be told. And told on their terms.
The opportunity to share that story with a global audience through Five Films For Freedom carries particular significance. “To see their story… celebrated so far and wide, and to know now that it’s going to be travelling to so many countries and reaching so many people is just so moving to me,” Amy says. Given how frequently disabled lives are marginalised or misrepresented, both on and off screen, that visibility matters.
But ultimately, while Five Films For Freedom allows Rag Dolls to reach audiences across borders and cultures, it is the film’s humanity that invites connection. Rather than instructing viewers how to feel, it simply gives them the opportunity to spend time with Rosalinda and Diana. For Ekiwah, that is where the film’s true strength lies. “It doesn’t attempt to teach you anything,” he says. “You can feel it under your skin by seeing a day in their life.” Film, he believes, has the power to shift lives and opinions precisely because of that proximity. “The minute that we take the time to look at each other with love,” he adds, “we actually exist in a far deeper way.”