About this Short Film
The Underlooked opens on the everyday reality of disabled people in Uganda — the sideways glances, the careless words, the quiet assumption that a body that moves or looks differently is a body that cannot contribute. Through intimate vérité moments, we witness the weight of a society that has long confused disability with inability, where demeaning language has calcified into accepted truth and low expectations have become a ceiling no one questions. But beneath that ceiling, life is full. The film shifts as we follow its subjects on their own terms — not as recipients of sympathy, but as people with ambitions, humor, and energy. A wheelchair does not stop a dancer. A visual impairment does not sideline an athlete. The film builds toward a jubilant, defiant finale: disabled Ugandans dancing freely, competing fiercely, and living loudly — doing everything the world told them they couldn't. The Underlooked is not a film about overcoming disability. It is a film about overcoming the story society tells about it.
Film Details
Film Transcript
People are ignorant about disability. What people think about persons with disability, especially those who are using wheelchairs, crutches, artificial limbs, is that most of them think these people are incapable or attention seekers. They have a mentality that those people are always begging for money, and others think they are vulnerable, they can't do anything, they are fragile, which is not true.
Children in our community are not aware of disability because most people, or most parents with children with disability, are not giving children with disability an opportunity to interact with other children. Even the language we are using in our communities is demeaning, whereby you find someone who, in the local language, is called someone who's incapable of doing anything. A person is called — you know — we have demeaning language being said in our community. They nickname, they don't help people with disabilities.
I wish the whole world would know that people with disabilities are not attention seekers, are not beggars. I wish to see a community whereby people with disability feel free to express themselves and they have a right to be treated well. They have rights to move out and go everywhere. Disability is not inability.
Filmmaker
Kizza Teflon Kizza is the filmmaker behind this entry. See every Focus on Ability entry from Kizza Teflon Kizza.
Want to hear how the festival goes?
We will email you when voting closes and the winners are announced. Nothing else, and you can stop any time.