SPOTLIGHT September 2026: SIAN HEDER, Filmmaker, Authenticity Avocate
Siân Heder has spent two decades building a body of work defined by empathy, specificity, and a fierce commitment to telling stories about people too often pushed to the margins. From her early short Mother , inspired by a nanny gig she took to get by, to CODA, the Oscar-winning family drama that made history for its deaf cast, to Being Heumann, her upcoming film about a foundational figure in the disability rights movement, Heder has built a career around a simple, radical idea of letting people tell their own stories, and casting the people those stories are actually about. It’s an idea that has led to both critical and financial success, and one that has helped move the needle for all women seeking to tell deeply human stories, whether behind the camera or in writers rooms.
That’s why, as she prepares to release her new film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, we choose to celebrate writer/director/producer Siân Heder in this month’s Spotlight.
AN INSPIRATIONAL BACKGROUND
Siân Heder was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of two working artists, Welsh sculptor Mags Harries and Hungarian artist Lajos Heder. Together they founded the Harries/Heder Collaborative, a Cambridge-based public art studio behind numerous civic commissions around the city. Growing up in a house full of working artists taught Heder about the commitment and passion it takes to build a creative life, and how to make a path for yourself when one isn’t made clear.
She carried that instinct into Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, earning her BFA in acting in 1999. Performance was the plan, but as for many aspiring actors, Los Angeles had other ideas. Roles didn’t come, so to pay the bills, Heder took a job with a nanny agency that placed babysitters with families staying at high-end Hollywood hotels. That gig would end up rerouting her entire career.
FINDING HER VOICE AS WRITER/DIRECTOR
Rather than wait around for someone to cast her, Heder started writing and directing her own material. In 2005, she was chosen as one of just eight women for the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women fellowship. Mother , the short that came out of that, pulled directly from her time as a hotel nanny, and it affirmed her as a writer/director with a unique and compelling voice. The film won the Cinéfondation prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, one of the festival’s top honors for emerging filmmakers. Mother also picked up the Grand Jury Award at the Florida Film Festival, and a host of other honors at festivals worldwide.
FINDING ACCLAIM
Heder also found ways to move her career forward on the small screen. She won a Peabody Award in 2010, alongside her fellow writers, on TNT’s Men of a Certain Age. On Orange Is the New Black, she sharpened the character-driven, emotionally specific storytelling that would come to define her features.
In 2016, she released her directorial debut Tallulah, starring Elliot Page and Allison Janney, which showed a style that included unconventional, messy family dynamics, and characters that crave deeper human connection. Like Mother, Tallulah examined societal expectations of women, something that could benefit from more examination, specifically by female filmmakers, onscreen. Premiering at Sundance, it was quickly scooped up by Netflix, which gave Heder her first real national spotlight as writer/director, and set the stage for the film that would take her to the Hollywood A-list.
TRAILBLAZER = RECORD BREAKER
That film was 2021’s CODA, an English-language remake of the 2014 French film La Famille Bélier, about a teenager who is the only hearing member in her deaf family. Heder was determined from early on that the film wouldn’t repeat Hollywood’s usual habit of casting hearing actors in deaf roles. She said flatly she would rather the movie never get made than see it made that way. She cast Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, alongside well-known theater actors Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant, in three of the film’s four lead roles, discovering Kotsur through his work at L.A.’s Deaf West Theatre. Starting at the script stage, she built the entire production around authentic ASL and Deaf culture.
CODA premiered as the opening night film of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where it swept the U.S. Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award, a directing prize for Heder, and a special jury award for its ensemble. Apple acquired worldwide rights for roughly $25 million, a record-breaking sale for the festival at the time. The following year, CODA took home three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Heder. Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor, making him only the second deaf performer (after Marlee Matlin’s performance for Children of a Lesser God), and the first deaf man, ever to win an acting Oscar. CODA also made history as the only film with a majority-deaf cast to win Best Picture.
That win puts Heder in genuinely rare company, and not just because so few women working behind the camera are nominated for Oscars. CODA took Best Picture the year directly after Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, making it back-to-back years a woman directed the Best Picture winner, for the first time in Oscar history. That’s no small thing in an industry where women still make up only a small fraction of directors, writers, and crew members working today. With CODA, Heder has directed one of the most decorated films of the decade, and in doing so, cracked the door a little wider for the women coming up behind her.
ART = ACTIVISM
For Heder, authentic casting was never a marketing angle, it came from a belief that people deserve direct ownership of how their own communities show up onscreen. She talked about embracing the disability-rights principle “Nothing About Us, Without Us” all through the making of CODA. It was exampled by her bringing in deaf collaborators from the earliest stages of the script, and consistently deferring to her deaf cast and crew on how their culture and experience got represented. For CODA, she brought in ASL Masters, not just as interpreters but as experts in Deaf culture, to work alongside collaborators like production designer Diane Lederman and cinematographer Paula Huidobro, shaping everything from set design to camera movement around an authentic Deaf point of view. She has also talked about deliberately building out a female led crew for CODA. For Heder, activism isn’t separate from filmmaking. From hiring practices to casting choices, inclusivity is an essential part of her work.
BRINGING BEING HEUMANN TO TIFF
That brings us to the long-awaited follow-up CODA, Being Heumann. She co-wrote the new release with Rebekah Taussig, directing and producing it under her overall deal with Apple Studios. It is based on the memoir of Judy Heumann, the disability rights pioneer often called the mother of the disability rights movement. It stars real-life wheelchair user Ruth Madeley as Heumann alongside Mark Ruffalo, Dylan O’Brien, Rob Delaney, Daniel Durant, and Ray Fisher, and chronicles Heumann’s leadership of the 1977 occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building. That historic 28-day sit-in forced the federal government to enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and helped pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act. Being Heumann premieres as the Opening Night Film of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2026, at Roy Thomson Hall, and will be released in theaters in November of this year.
WHAT’S NEXT
Heder already has her next film lined up. She’s writing and directing the film adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s bestselling novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.. It’s a book that has sold over four million copies, and spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. The story follows Sadie Green and Sam Masur, childhood friends who reunite in college and build a wildly successful video game studio together. Their creative partnership spans decades of friendship and rivalry. Daisy Edgar-Jones is set to star as Sadie. Based on her work on CODA, Paramount Pictures believes Heder is the right fit, as a writer/director who can handle a story that spans three decades and features a complex emotional landscape. Her attachment to the project is an all-too-rare example of a studio selecting a female filmmaker, however successful, for a beloved bestseller. We hope it is a portent of more choices like that to come by major studios.
WHY WE CHOSE HER
From a short film born out of a job she took just to get by, to an Oscar-winning family drama that reshaped what authentic representation could look like in Hollywood, to a biopic honoring one of the most consequential activists in American history, Siân Heder’s career has been one long argument that people deserve to tell their own stories. With her work, Heder has proved, in all the ways the industry measures success, that those stories are universal, commercial, and Oscar-worthy. She did it as a woman writer/director in an industry that still hands jobs to less talented men an overwhelming majority of the time. As she prepares to premiere her new release at TIFF, we can’t wait to see what she does with Judy Heumann’s story. We celebrate her commitment to inclusive, nuanced storytelling, and the path she is creating for aspiring female filmmakers who come along behind her. — Leslie Combemale
