In mainstream filmmaking it is rare to see images of the body which deviate from preconceived ideas of 'normality'.

Physical or mental disabilities are most often presented on screen only in a negative light. Avant-garde filmmakers present the trials and triumphs of being disabled in more subtle and complex ways, often from intensely personal points of view. Perceptions of what is considered normal are challenged through tales which range for painful to humorous.

For Stephen Dwoskin, disabled by polio as a boy, his disability, and it's subsequent illness, has been the subject or backdrop to many of his films. Filtered through personal relationships and experiences, his films challenge preconceived notions of what it means to live with disability. Sandra Lahire's relationship to her body was shaped by her life-long battle against Anorexia Nervosa. The beautiful yet painful images in her film Arrows are a testament to her attempts to both overcome and come to terms with her condition. Many of Andrew Kötting's films depict his daughter Eden, who was born with a rare genetic disorder which caused cerebral vermis hypoplasia and other neurological complications. Images of Eden, found medical footage and interviews with a top neurophysiologist, combine in his film Mapping Perception to challenge our perceptions of difference.

Film and video has also been used to challenge perceptions of illness, both in relation to medical representations and personal experience. In It's Inside, Katherine Meynell and Alistair Skinner used an array of multi-media, from video projection and performance to cast medical instruments and cherries in jelly, to explore and challenge conventional notions of disease and cure. In The Pits, David Critchley worked with the doctor Liz Lee and her patient Steven to explore the experience of clinical depression and therapy, using metaphors from his own art practice as means of representing this ambiguous and often misrepresented condition.