The Easterseals Disabled Film Challenge announced its 2025 edition winners at the annual Orange Carpet and Awards Ceremony held at Sony Pictures Studios on Thursday. During the movie challenge, participants have five days on a designated schedule to write and produce 1-5 minutes of short films, which will facilitate disability inclusion before and after the camera.

"I created the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge to help speed up change and provide a focus for talented filmmakers and actors, thus providing them with the opportunity to showcase their work and be seen," said EDFC founder Nic Novicki. "We are proud of the amazing films we have made in the past 12 years and I am grateful that the challenge has allowed many of our participants to continue to have such outstanding success, and the recent Nik Sanchez played a role in Accountant 2 based on his participation in last year's competition."

Celebrating 12 years of leadership and advocating for real actors/storytelling, the 2025 Challenge featured genre of “Thrillers and Suspense.” This year's Film Challenge received 123 comments from countries including Austria, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Britain, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Singapore, East Timor and the Netherlands.

The winners received honors in six categories: Best Film, Best Director, Best Editor, Best Actor, Best Writer and Best Promotional Sports. EDFC also awarded $5,000 Seed Fund/Movie Completion Grant to this year’s winners (provided by Adobe) and awarded five $25,000 Alumni Adobe grants to winners in previous years to further develop their short films into a feature-length film or plot series.

See the full list of 2025 Easterseals Disability Movie Challenges below.

The best movies from Sony Pictures:

"Everhand" (Lee Cleveland)

The best director proposed by NBCuniversal:

Shane Hillier, “Forever man”

Best Actors proposed by IMDBPRO:

Dashiell Meier on "Day 21"

The best awareness proposed by Amazon MGM Studios:

“Emergency Plan” Anna Pakman

Netflix's best writers:

Steve Way & Danny Kurtzman "We'll meet again"

Best Editors proposed by Adobe Foundation:

Lily Drummond's "Assumption, End"