GREAT FALLS — Great Falls residents are showcasing their acting and editing skills in the 2026 Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge. The annual competition requires entries to have at least one disabled person on their crew as they battle against the clock.
Jenniffer Robinson, who teaches braille, does not let her blindness block her creativity. Since 2021, she and her team at Kryodragon Productions have participated in the challenge.
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"You have six days to write a script, film the movie, edit it and send it in," Robinson said.
This year, the chosen genre is dramedy. Robinson and her team’s film is called “Worlds Apart.” It is about a class reunion at a blind school, focusing on a woman who meets an old friend for food and conversation.
"Throughout the conversation, it's shown that not everything is quite as it seems with her and her friend, and a lot is shown throughout it. It explores themes of grief and, mental health," Robinson said.
Kristi Eaglehorse stars as Mrs. Powell, a former instructor at the school. For Eaglehorse, who is also legally blind, her acting debut was a pleasant surprise.
"I didn't think I could do that. I really didn't think I had it in me to portray another person or whatever," Eaglehorse said.
Eaglehorse struggled with her vision loss after moving to Montana from California several years ago. Since then, she has taken a proactive approach to living with her disability. As a visual artist, she creates clay sculptures and teaches a class at the Montana Association for the Blind’s summer program in Great Falls. She says doing new things, like learning braille and acting, have helped ease the pain.
"Doing the film is like a next step of learning how to be more free within myself and be more independent to try new things. Believe it or not, actually doing that film helped him beat down a lot of my fear," Eaglehorse said.
Disability advocate Shyla Patera also has an entry in the film challenge called “Shyla’s 504 Gatekeeper.” She did most of the work, including filming, and it draws on real life experiences.
"It's it's supposed to be about, what happens when we all need services, but we have a gatekeeper that we have to go find to get them. So, I this is based on real life events," Patera said.
Right now, the challenge is in the awareness campaign. People can log on to the Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge webpage to show their support.
This article has been lightly edited with the assistance of AI for clarity, syntax, and grammar.
