Film Forum

The Squeaky Wheel is the first-ever satire publication that focuses on the experience of having a disability. It challenges common misconceptions, highlights absurdity, criticizes imbalances, and does it all with humor. Bringing you disability satire for disabled people and by disabled people, contributors to The Squeaky Wheel pride themselves on their hot takes and creative perspectives. The satire publication has expanded into a workshop program, an international television series, a gift shop, and a talent network for disabled comedians.

Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. Reid’s first feature film, I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the McBaine Bay Area Documentary Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It had a national broadcast on POV in 2023. The film has been hailed by critics: Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com described it as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice.” Vox called it a “must-see.” In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A Cerebral Game, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. That film, along with his short documentaries Wheelchair Diaries and Ramped Up are distributed by New Day Films. Reid’s work has been supported by The Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, ITVS, NBCUniversal, CNN and the Points North Institute, among others. Reid was a 2017 TED fellow and gave a TED Talk about incorporating his own literal body into his filmmaking. His work has been featured by outlets like NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Davenport received a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University in 2016, and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication from The George Washington University in 2012.

Steven Verdile is a designer and comedy writer with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. He lives in New York City with his girlfriend, spending his mornings drinking iced coffee and his evenings binging television and going to see musicals. An advocate for authentic representation in media, he created The Squeaky Wheel to amplify disabled voices and bring humor to the nuances of living with a disability.


Richard Brody, a film critic at The New Yorker, began contributing there in 1999 and has published articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Wes Anderson. He writes film reviews and The Front Row, a blog about movies. He is the author of the book Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard and is at work on a book about the lasting influence of the French New Wave.

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