Directed by Dan Habib and Samuel Habib, Samuel, 21, wants to date, leave home, go to college. But he drives a 350-pound wheelchair, uses a communication device, and can have a seizure at any moment. Determined to find his path forward, he seeks out guidance from America’s most rebellious disability activists. Will they empower him to launch the bold adult life he craves? Also featuring: Lydia X.Z. Brown, Judith Heumann, Keith Jones, Ali Stroker and Maysoon Zayid.
Documentaries have always been a perfect vehicle for seeing things from someone else’s perspective and that’s exactly what you get with The Ride Ahead. You get to see what daily life looks like for Samuel Habib, and the obstacles he’s determined to remove. They then widen that perspective with the help of other disabled people coming from different generations and facing different issues. Building a fantastic platform to explore why representation and accessibility are so important.
One of the key focuses to The Ride Ahead is education, and the vital nature of having disabled children included in general education. Samuel Habib is a wonderful example of how much of a difference it can make, both for fellow disabled kids and for the students around them to have a bigger awareness of disability. It’s something you’d hope that all schools would do but sadly, it’s clearly not a common experience.
If you could boil down a lot of what this documentary is saying into a very simple message, it could be that one of the biggest difficulties which disabled people face is not their disability, it’s other people. It’s something that our society struggles with daily, having awareness and thinking of others. So, by creating The Ride Ahead, Samuel builds an effective way to show the need to get in at that early age, to teach children about disability, to eradicate this ancient perspective focused on differences and drenched with condescension.
The style and tone are another key thing here, there is undoubtedly a huge amount of frustration and anger at the way that a lot of the time, the world is built as though disabled people don’t exist. Yet, Dan Habib and Samuel Habib do such a wonderful job of holding onto a positive atmosphere, it’s about progression and having a voice, not simply railing against a broken system. Similar to how it recognises the intense risks and unpredictable nature of Samuel’s disability but again is not about getting lost in what could happen, it focuses on moving forward, building his life as an adult.
The Ride Ahead is honest and charmingly transparent, it shows you the world from Samuel’s perspective and how things need to progress to make the world a better, more understanding place for everyone. It’s surprisingly funny as it really brings through Samuel’s vibrant personality, and the family dynamic is joyous to watch, so loving and thoughtful. It is certainly politically driven because there’s a genuine, meaningful purpose to this documentary, but it’s also grounded and touching.
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