The lives and creative interests of children and youth with disabilities in New York City’s schools are woefully undervalued. To help change that, we created The Film Festival From MARS: A  Showcase for Media by Students in Special Education. It is a fun-filled, annual event established in 2016 that unites students, parents and teachers in celebrating and recognizing the creative gifts of our future generation. Filmmaking is a transformational educational endeavor that is too often reserved for the privileged few. That is nothing short of a tragedy in today’s world where lacking media culture savvy and skills in the art of communication can cost our young people their civic voice. The FFFM stakes a claim to the vision that children and youth in Special Education deserve access to high quality media arts programming as we help make it a reality.