This essay argues that documentary’s longstanding investment in “access” has obscured the transactions with power that make access possible. Prompted by recent controversies surrounding films such as Retrograde (Matthew Heineman 2022) and Jihad Rehab (Meg Smaker 2022), I examine how access has come to function as an ethical virtue and a form of documentary capital. Tracing this logic through the history of carceral access in U.S. social-issue documentary, I revisit Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) and the landmark legal battle restricting its release. Rather than treating the film primarily as an exposé of state violence, I focus on the bureaucratic negotiations and legal obstacles structuring its production and circulation. I argue that Commonwealth v. Wiseman helped consolidate a neoliberal framework for documentary ethics preoccupied with liability and risk management, while transforming access into a form of property granted and regulated by the state. Documentary access emerges in this light not as a challenge to carceral power but as its accessory. I turn to disability justice for an abolitionist understanding of access, drawing on the movement for deinstitutionalization and psychiatric survivor activism. Through analyses of formerly incarcerated filmmaker Rahsaan Thomas’s Friendly Signs (2023) and Jordan Lord’s Documentary Participation Agreement (2024), I explore how access is relocated from privileged entry into sites of confinement to collective relations of interdependence and shared responsibility. These projects suggest how documentary might move beyond a compromised ethics of carceral access toward a liberatory politics oriented not merely toward exposing captivity but toward ending it.
Accessibility has gained increasing visibility within Indonesia's film culture through initiatives developed by film festivals and community-based organisers. While disability rights discourse has long focused on education, employment, and public services, cultural accessibility, particularly in cinema, has received comparatively limited scholarly attention. This article examines how three Indonesian film festivals—Minikino Film Week (MFW) in Bali, 100% Manusia Film Festival in Jakarta, and Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF) in Yogyakarta—develop inclusive cinema practices within distinct institutional and infrastructural conditions. Drawing on interviews with festival organisers, volunteers, bisik (whispering) buddies, and blind audience members, as well as participant observation and programme materials, the study argues that accessibility in these contexts operates as a “relational infrastructure” rather than a standardised technical solution. Inclusive screenings emerge through collaborations among organisers, disability communities, commercial exhibitors, and volunteers, requiring continual negotiation across institutional contexts. Often temporary and event-based, these initiatives nonetheless reshape cinematic publics by recalibrating who is anticipated within festival space. By foregrounding accessibility as an evolving, collaborative arrangement shaped by linguistic diversity, economic constraint, and institutional scale, the article demonstrates how inclusive cinema in Indonesia is built incrementally through relational practice.
Contemporary debates have repositioned children’s animation within broader cultural and pedagogical discourses, challenging its long-standing confinement to the domain of entertainment. This shift is closely linked to animation’s expressive capacities beyond photographic realism and to its ability to mobilise universal codes and intuitive visual languages for the mediation of knowledge, values and social difference. Within this framework, the article examines the Cartoon Able model, developed by the Italian animation studio Animundi in collaboration with the publishing house Puntidivista for the production of Lampadino e Caramella nel MagiRegno degli Zampa (2020–), a series broadcasted by the Italian public service RAI. The analysis argues that the Cartoon Able model represents a singular experiment within the Italian animation landscape, explicitly conceived to formalise inclusion-and accessibility-oriented practices for children’s content and to position them as potentially transferable. By deconstructing the model, the article investigates how inclusion is articulated not only through narrative and aesthetic strategies, but also across the production, institutional and regulatory frameworks underpinning Italian television animation. Methodologically, the study combines close textual and formal analysis with a production-oriented perspective, integrating approaches from animation studies, disability studies, media education and media industry studies.
