She won Hollywood's highest honor. So why was making her next film so hard?

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred It’s pronounced “human.” Yet writer-director Siân Heder acknowledges that the unusual spelling of the title of her new movie, “Being Heumann,” is something people might give a puzzled second look, unsure of how to say it and possibly dismissing it altogether.Which, the more she sat with it, made it perfect as the title for a portrait of real-life disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who, while being in a wheelchair, made herself undismissable.More specifically, the film looks at the pivotal 1977 protest in which Heumann led a group in a 26-day sit-in at a federal office building in San Francisco until the government began enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the first federal law that recognized disability as a civil rights category.

Movies From a new “Resident Evil” reboot from the director of “Weapons” to Oscar contenders starring Mikey Madison and Tom Cruise, here are the movies we’ll be at this fall.“The fact that her last name was ‘human’ has so many beautiful layers of meaning,” says Heder, 49, during a recent interview in Los Angeles.“I think Judy was asking for the world to see disabled people as human beings who were worthy of rights and being looked at and being included.”A world premiere and the opening-night selection of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, “Being Heumann” will hit theaters Nov.

6 and begin streaming on Apple TV Nov.13.

It is also, crucially, Heder’s first film since 2021’s “CODA,” the bittersweet drama about a young woman in a Deaf family (the title is an acronym for “child of Deaf adults”) that won three Academy Awards including adapted screenplay for Heder and best picture.In Heumann, a wheelchair user after contracting polio as a child, Heder found a subject who was in the process of discovering herself as a leader: learning when to hold firm a...