Meet the Superhumans

Why it works

The film that changed how disability is shown on screen. Set to Public Enemy, it presents Paralympians as elite athletes first — power, speed, attitude — then cuts without warning to the car crash, the warzone, the pregnant mother in a hospital, before slamming back to training. No pity, no euphemism, total swagger. Launched simultaneously across 78 UK channels at 9pm on July 17, 2012, it helped make the London Paralympics a mainstream broadcasting event and won the Cannes Film Craft Grand Prix, a D&AD Black Pencil and Campaign's campaign of the year. It is studied for reframing an entire social category through tone — the insight that respect, not sympathy, was the revolutionary stance — and as the high mark of in-house creative work by a broadcaster.