As a shy, neurodiverse child, Sam Riesel “found comfort in watching shows and films”, devouring Star Wars and Back to the Future and laughing at Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The 23-year-old aspiring producer is now channelling his love for film into a fledgling career in Australia’s screen industry. But jobs are tough to come by as many Australians with disabilities, like Riesel, are being denied careers in film and television due to bureaucratic requirements in the programs that are supposed to help them, but which don’t cater for the realities of the industry.

Through his studies at Bus Stop Films, which provides industry courses for people with disabilities at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in New South Wales, Riesel has gained half a dozen short-term jobs so far – most recently a four-week stint as a production trainee on a romcom that was shot in Sydney over nine weeks.

“The people were all very lovely, and I did anything they needed me to do on set,” he says. In between film jobs, he supplements his income by running errands or walking friends’ dogs. “I’ve been able to carry myself through,” he says. “That’s not something everyone can do, unfortunately.”

Disability activists are lobbying the federal government to overhaul programs that subsidise and incentivise companies to hire people with disabilities, such as JobAccess. They say the criteria to qualify – requiring a role to last for a minimum of 13 weeks – has effectively lead to the “exclusion” of the screen industry, as most shoots last much less than 13 weeks.

There is currently “no incentive nor any support for employers in the screen industry to hire a person with a disability”, says Tracey Corbin-Matchett, chief executive officer of Bus Stop Films. While she thinks JobsAccess is an “excellent” service, it is “disconnected” from the realities of how film and TV industries work.

“I imagine when it was set up [in 2006] that people weren’t even thinking about people with disabilities in jobs in the screen industry,” she says.

Riesel “definitely thinks” that scrapping or reducing the 13-week requirement would land him more work; none of his jobs have lasted anywhere near that long. In the meantime, he attends screen industry events to get his foot in more doors, which “can be a bit difficult because of anxiety”, he admits.

Ade Djajamihardja’s story is a stark example of how disability can impact a screen career. The writer and producer began his career as a floor manager with ABC TV News, then worked his way up on programs such as Countdown Revolution, The Big Gig and The Late Show, before setting up his own production company, A2K Media, with his partner Kate Stephens.

But in 2011, Djajamihardja suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke that required urgent brain surgery under a medically induced coma, which many did not expect him to survive. He spent seven months in hospital, learning to breathe independently again and sit upright.

After three decades in the business, Djajamihardja, now in a wheelchair, found himself cast as a “re-emerging” producer, he says. “When Ade tried to get back into the screen industry, literally the first five meetings he couldn’t get in the door,” Stephens adds. “He couldn’t even physically access the buildings.”

(Djajamijardja’s “meditation mantra” to get through hard times, he jokes, is “inner peace, inner peace, inner freakin’ peace”.)

The pair have been fighting to improve accessibility in the Australian screen industry ever since, making productions led by disabled creatives such as the panel show The Wheelhouse and Tales from the Crips. Their production company A2K Media is poised to launch an online training module, Disability Justice Lens, which aims to encourage Australia’s screen industry to increase hiring rates for workers with disabilities, but they need more funding to get the module to its final phase.

Djajamihardja and Stephens were key collaborators with a first-of-its-kind national survey of 518 screen industry workers, which found “disabled workers face prejudice and discrimination on a regular basis”. The final report, Disability and Screen Work in Australia – which featured Djajamihardja in his wheelchair on the cover – found that “government programs such as JobAccess … do not appear to be well known or widely used in the screen industry”.

More recent research shows Australian film and television has a long way to go. In April, a Screen Australia report found only 6.6% of characters on screen identified as having a disability, compared with 17.7% of the general population. And last year, the Screen Diversity Inclusion Network’s Everyone Counts report showed that among 2,811 cast and crew on 70 Australian film and TV productions, only 8.9% of people on screen and 5.3% of people behind the camera had a disability.

Bus Stop’s Corbin-Matchett believes reforming the criteria around employment subsidies would combat discrimination. “Crewing up with more people with disabilities is really going to flow on to the story that’s told, and the way it’s told,” she says. “If there was a wage subsidy to employ more people with a disability, we would see more characters with a disability.

“I call it exposure theory: people get more comfortable around disability when they work more with people with disabilities. Change will come when we have more people with disabilities working together.”

JobAccess general manager Daniel Valientl-Riedl says he is keen to work with the screen industry, even though he calls it “problematic” for being “very casualised, really staggered”. “When the industry unfortunately is so erratic in the way they provide employment to people, it is difficult to make the argument that it is sustainable long-term, because there is no certainty around the hours the person is going to be able to do,” he adds. “It’s complex.”

There have been significant wins for creatives with disability in front of and behind the camera: notably the award-winning SBS series Latecomers, led by co-creators and writers Emma Myers and Angus Thompson, who both have cerebral palsy, alongside comedian Nina Oyama.

Myers says screen funding initiatives aimed at people from under-represented backgrounds – such as Digital Originals, under which Latecomers was funded – are “a great thing, and there should be more of them catered specifically for creatives with disabilities … I don’t think I’d be in this industry if those initiatives didn’t exist.”

The stars of the show are disability advocate and writer Hannah Diviney, who plays Sarah, and Thompson as Frank: two characters whose sexual journeys, rather than their disabilities, are front and centre of the story. Diviney, who has cerebral palsy, is “as far as we know, the first person with a disability to do a sex scene on Australian television,” she says. “I knew how much this would mean to our community and the chance of other projects coming along where disabled people have sex on screen was pretty limited.”

Playing Sarah in Latecomers led to Diviney being cast in her first film: the upcoming family dramedy Audrey. The film’s producer Michael Wrenn confirms they did access an employment subsidy for Diviney via JobAccess, which enabled them to make accessibility modifications on the home where the film was shot to accommodate her wheelchair. This then prompted the film’s writer to rewrite Diviney’s character, originally written as having more mobility than she has, as a wheelchair user.

While Diviney was on set for only six weeks, her employment qualified for the minimum 13-week subsidy by including her pre-production work on the film – an extreme rarity for the industry. Diviney’s employment on Audrey is now a test case for JobAccess and how it can be used to employ more people with disabilities in the screen industry.

“For everyone it was a real learning experience, because a lot of them hadn’t necessarily seen or spent time with disability before,” says Diviney. “There was a lot of uncertainty from everybody I think around whether it would work, myself included. I’m hopeful that when people get to see the film and talk about it, the industry at large will not see disability as such a scary thing.”