Oscar-winning CODA director Siân Heder brought Being Heumann, her film about the disability rights activist Judith Heumann, to the Royal Festival Hall as a London Film Festival Gala.
Siân Heder, the director of CODA, showed Being Heumann as a Gala at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Monday 12 October 2026. The film is about the disability rights activist Judith Heumann, and Mark Ruffalo is in the cast.
Heder was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1977, the daughter of the artists Mags Harries and Lajos Héder. She trained at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama.
A job with a nanny agency became Mother, her first short, which played at Cannes and the London Film Festival. She wrote for Orange Is the New Black. CODA won her the Academy Award and the BAFTA for adapted screenplay in 2021.
Ruth Madeley plays Heumann in an adaptation of her memoir, written by Heder with Rebekah Taussig. The film recreates the activists’ 28-day occupation of San Francisco’s Federal Building in 1977.
The film opened the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September, and the London Gala gave it its first British audience. Apple TV carries it from 13 November.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Award nominee, plays Joseph Califano, the secretary of health, education and welfare the activists confronted. Dylan O’Brien also appears.