About VALIANT

VALIANT is a short, educational film about building and maintaining healthy relationships and developing protective behaviour skills. Through four stories, VALIANT explores issues related to consent, sexuality and healthy relationships for people with disability.

VALIANT is supported by an educational guide developed by Northcott’s Sexuality and Relationship Education team. This guide aims to encourage discussion and learning around dating and relationships. It is intended to help spark conversations between people with disability, teachers, carers and others in their support network. It also provides tips and advice to help people with disability and their families and carers build respect for each other, navigate relationships and better understand another person’s needs and wishes.

Watch Valiant

To watch the full film visit the Northcott website 

Education Guide

To view the brilliant education guide that the team at Northcott have created visit the Northcott website

People with disability and relationships

Everyone has the right to intimacy and building healthy relationships, including people with disability. Yet access to education and understanding about sexual consent, relationships and dating is often limited – or non-existent.

For young people with disability, the need to learn about relationships, sexuality and sexual health can be overlooked, ignored or deemed unnecessary. In reality however, people with disability – and their parents, carers and support networks – often need extra support to learn about relationships and how to express their sexuality in positive and healthy ways.

Coupled with the education guide, Valiant aims to provide an entertaining, judgement-free tool to help start conversations about relationships for people with disability.

Share VALIANT

Education around relationships, consent and sexual health is hard to come by – particularly for young people with disability.

Watching VALIANT and using the education guide is a good place to start if you or somebody you know wants to learn more about relationships.

VALIANT is freely available online for schools, service providers, parents, carers and other support people.

The making of VALIANT

The idea for this project came from experiences seen during filmmaking classes for people with disability run by Bus Stop Films. With participants forming relationships while attending its programs, Bus Stop Films identified a need to support these young people in building safe and respectful relationships and understanding consent.

Using its expertise in inclusive filmmaking, Bus Stop Films saw an opportunity to develop an educational resource that could enable young people with disability to feel empowered, while also addressing a gap in education.

As a leader in sexuality and relationship services for people with disability, Northcott was invited to collaborate with Bus Stop Films on the project.

VALIANT content

The content for VALIANT was developed from six 3-hour workshops run by Bus Stop Films. People with disability actively participated in conversations about consent and healthy relationships. These conversations evolved to become the screenplay for VALIANT, written by Emily Dash. The film was directed by filmmaker Claudia Bailey, who also ran the workshops and students from Bus Stop Films participated as cast and crew. Congratulations to everyone involved, especially our students, cast and crew. A huge thanks to Panavision, Ironbark Films, Zig Zag Sound and Actors Centre Australia who generously supported the film.

Starring:

• Lauren Patrick
• LJ Wilson
• Shay Bell
• Emily Scerri-Rikkert
• Ricky Kremmer
• Dina Kremmer
• Ngali Shaw
• Liam Luff

Artwork by Meagan Pelham from Studio A.

“Cards” – original song written and performed by Ella Clair (Produced by Bailey Judd)

Still photography by Julia Firak

Director of Photography: Shane Parsons

Producers: Tracey Corbin-Matchett and Dianna La Grassa

Editor: Julian Neuhaus

Executive Producers: Tracey Corbin-Matchett and Courtney Gibson