Anand Padmasenan critically examines the relationship between colour deficiency, cinema, and disability through his documentary film The Color of Colours.
“The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.” – John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Cinema is not just a storytelling medium but also a diagnostic tool. This dawned on me when I started working on The Color of Colours. This documentary attempts to translate my perceptual world as a colour blind filmmaker into a visual language others can access. This process raised a deeper question that extends beyond filmmaking. What does it mean to ‘see’ when seeing is assumed to be universal?
This article argues that cinema becomes a critical site for understanding, engaging and subverting colour blindness through its narrative, semiotics, and emotional meaning. The role of colours in design has grown significantly in recent years, driven by the revolution in print and digital media. Colours cannot be restricted to the role of aesthetics, as they often perform crucial functional roles in our lives. Colour blindness or colour deficiency usually evokes a sense of mystery and wonder, hindering productive discussions on inclusive approaches.
This mystery around access and disability centres on two critical factors. First, colours have rarely existed without meaning in human history. Dating back to ancient art forms, colour has always been used to convey emotions. The terminology of colour blindness puts the concept at a disadvantage, since most colour blind individuals are not blind to all colours. Instead, they experience a deficiency in perceiving certain hues. The real struggle lies in accessing the meaning and the emotional, semiotic, political, and personal connections to colours. People rarely analyse these connections critically. Second, and perhaps a bigger hurdle, is the lack of consistent information about colour blindness. Each website and article presents a different view of what a colour blind person sees, making it genuinely difficult to assess the condition based on guesses and assumptions.
A Provocation: Deficiency, Impairment and Disability
I am yearning for an elsewhere – and, perhaps, an ‘elsewhen’ – in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral – Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip
I suggest considering colour blindness or deficiency alongside disability, particularly in discussions about accessibility, where colour blindness or deficiency is contrasted with an able-bodied, “normal,” “healthy,” and “complete” body. Scholars such as Alison Kafer and Margrit Shildrick present an alternative through the political/relational model of disability, which brings together deficiency, impairment, and disability. The political/relational model of disability moves away from seeing disability as something that exists only within the body (as the medical model does), or only as a social construct (as the social model does). The article does not claim that people with colour blindness or deficiency experience the same levels of discrimination that people with visible disabilities do. Instead, the filmmaking process and the film itself rely heavily on disability studies as a mode of thinking and as a way to share affinities with the theoretical and political ways of thinking about ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ and ‘complete’ bodies, allowing us to move beyond compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness.
Kafer in Feminist, Queer, Crip emphasises the political, social, and temporal relations that shape disability. Kafer’s disability and political theory relies on collective affinities, where disability politics encompasses all those labelled as ‘disabled or sick and have faced discrimination as a result’ rather than because of any essential similarities amongst all of them. Similarly, Margrit Shildrick in her works Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality views disability as something that destabilises boundaries between self and other, ability and disability. For her, disability reveals that all bodies are interdependent, porous, and relational.
Together, their work suggests that disability is not inherent to the body but becomes meaningful through its relations to environments, technologies, and cultural values. The social model would argue that colour blindness disables people because the world organises and designs itself around colour based distinctions, like in traffic signals, data visualisation, or film colour grading. The difficulty lies not in the eye itself, but in the social and design systems that rely on specific hues for meaning. When visual information relies on colours inaccessible to colour-blind viewers, it becomes disabling.
Colour, Subjectivity, and the Incommunicability of Vision
My lived experience with colour blindness shows that perception is subjective and is influenced by cultural expectations. We assume that colour words (such as red, green, blue) map to visual experiences in the same way for everyone. A central challenge is that colour blind individuals themselves struggle to understand what they are ‘blind’ to. We cannot directly experience another person’s visual reality. Consequently, for someone with colour blindness to understand that they are ‘blind’ to a particular colour, they would first need to experience that colour. The reality is that a colour blind individual does see the colour they are blind to. They perceive them differently from how normal vision does. The colour exists, but its visual signature and design, art or visual storytelling cues can be ambiguous or entirely different. This disconnect is rarely linguistic and often experiential.
I was in a unique position while studying film, with cinema offering me a tool to dismantle the opaque walls around colour blindness and to provide a consistent reference point for non colour blind people to understand what colour deficiency looks like.
Cinema as a Critical Tool
Cinema is a medium deeply involved with colour at every stage, from storyboarding to set design, costumes, and makeup. Colours are present throughout the filmmaking process. A film about colour blindness must acknowledge this presence. Representations of colour blindness in still images have existed for a long time, but it remains rare for moving images. This highlights the inconsistency in how the still images were produced, because showing colour blindness in motion requires reproducing accurate results for every frame. This was the biggest challenge when making The Color of Colours.
Films are generally shot on a flat profile. This means the original footage has low contrast and a flat colour profile, allowing the camera to capture as many details as possible that would otherwise be lost in shadows, blacks and saturated colours. We can then grade this footage to the colours we want and the levels we need without losing any information.
This traditional way of keeping the footage and grading it in post-production helps us understand how we can approach the problem of colour blindness. Since the colour profile is flat in the footage, we can isolate the reds during colour grading and then adjust the colours in that region alone. We chose red for this film specifically because the type of colour blindness I have is protanopia, in which the eye cannot perceive the red-green colour because of reduced sensitivity to red light, and it is replaced by shades of brown and green.
The film’s subject was important too. On a storytelling level, it was crucial to explore areas rooted in cultural colour. The documentary shows various art forms across Kerala, ranging from Kathakali to Theeyattu and Kalamezhuthu. In Kathakali, colours are not just decorative. They encode moral character (red for evil, green for virtue). Our narrative question was, What if these colour codes no longer ‘read’ the way most spectators assume they do? Does the meaning of the art change?
Colours have been integral to Kerala arts since the murals on temple rock surfaces. This practice can be traced back to Kalamezhuthu, an art using natural ingredients. The ingredients for Kalamezhuthu are five natural, coloured powders, including white from rice flour, black from charcoal powder, yellow from turmeric powder, green from powdered leaves, and red from a mixture of turmeric powder and lime. These powders are used to create a ritualistic drawing on a prepared floor, often using cow dung, without any brushes or palettes. This five colour concept was transferred from mural painting to Theyyam, Theeyatt, and eventually Kathakali, with the colours denoting values of the characters depicted in the painting.
One aim of the film was to capture a character who is denoted by a specific colour, for example, red to indicate they are evil and then use the post-processing of the film to make them look virtuous by making them green. Once the colour grading process was finalised, we applied this to the narrative. In key sequences, colours shift gradually from green to red, so that the audience experiences less clarity in moral coding. The result reframes narrative moral binaries, making viewers aware not only of what they see but also of how much they take shared visual meaning for granted.
The Problem with Accessibility
Much of accessibility thinking positions disability in terms of adaptation, making environments readable, ‘fixing’ or enhancing senses, or creating alternative cues. My work urges something complementary by questioning how the norm is built, what assumptions underlie visual signification, and how narrative, media, and culture operate within these assumptions of a universal vision.
Interestingly, this makes media and film a means of analysing disabilities. What the film ultimately demonstrated was that these insights emerged not through theory alone, but through the material practice of colour grading. The process of isolating hues, shifting red to green, and observing resultant shifts in narrative implication revealed that disability is not located in perception itself but in systems that decide how colour is expected to operate.
In this sense, the editing timeline functioned as a site where the relational model of disability became observable at the micro level. Here, cinema exceeds its status as a representational medium and becomes a methodological instrument for interrogating disability. My attempt to make the footage legible to non colour blind viewers exposed the extent to which mainstream design standards propagate perceptual uniformity. If a single adjustment to colour grading can reorient meaning so substantially, then cinema possesses the ability to deeply analyse, unsettle, and reimagine visual conventions.
Kafer argues that society assumes specific ways of moving, perceiving, and experiencing the world as ‘normal’ or ‘neutral’. This assumption renders able-bodied experience as the universal standard against which ‘disability’ is defined. By foregrounding difference not as exceptional but as part of design, cinema can reveal how much of what we consider ‘normal’ is simply the most common, but not necessarily inclusive.
Conclusion
Medical perspectives often define colour blindness as a deficiency, lack, or impairment. However, my experience and film suggest an alternative approach in which seeing differently is not a problem to solve but a lens for questioning what seeing is, what ‘normal vision’ is, and how we build inclusive narratives and infrastructures that assume less.
About the author
Anand Padmasenan is a filmmaker, writer, and designer with a Master’s Degree in Film and Video communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and a Bachelor’s in Architecture. His work explores the intersection of visual storytelling, accessibility, and inclusive design, often drawing from personal experience. Anand’s practice blends critical academic questioning with the visual and literary mediums, using documentary films, fiction and essays to challenge norms and reframe creative education. You can reach out to him at anandpadmasenan@gmail.com.
References
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press.
Shildrick, Margrit. 2009. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan.
Padmasenan, Anand. 2025. The Color of Colours.
