When an interabled queer couple spends the night together for the first time, they must confront their complex relationships with desire, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and what it means truly to love another person.

Director’s Vision for ‘As You Are’

I always explain the creation of this film as being prophetic. I was 17 when I wrote it and originally deemed it as simply a work of fiction from two communities I was not a part of. As I went through the process of making and sharing the film with the world, I didn’t just find a love for filmmaking, I found a love for the disabled and queer communities. I wrote monologues about healing the characters healing their relationships with their bodies and intimacy, but instead, I found that I began to heal my own too. After watching the film, I hope that audiences expand their views about what love is and can be. I hope it begins to reshape their understanding of the disabled body as beautiful, as desirable, and as deserving of love. This film has given me the gift of a lifetime in the friendship between Bri Scalesse, Estefania Giraldo, and myself. We have become like sisters and there is no other story with no other collaborators I would want as my first film.