He’s frustrated, aggressive and rude; his desire is driving him mad. René suffers from a terminal wasting disease, he’s 50, confined to a wheelchair, and lives in a home for the disabled.
Fortunately, a young nurse called Julie takes mercy on him. She wheels René down to Nationale 7, the main highway running down to southern France, and works her way through the ranks of prostitutes camped out in caravans along the edge of the highway. Julie takes a tape measure, and strikes a deal with the owner of the only trailer wide enough for René’s wheelchair. Four minutes and 400 francs later, René emerges from the trailer a changed man: affable, jokey, visibly relieved.René may be fiction – the hero of Jean-Pierre Sinapi’s black comedy about love, sex and the disabled called Uneasy Riders (Nationale 7 in France) – but his character is based on a true story.

“One of my sisters, Julie, works as a carer for disabled people near Toulon,” explains Sinapi. “A disabled man in his early fifties, who was brave enough to express that he wanted to make love to a woman, asked her to help him. So my sister, in real life, took the disabled man in a van on to the Nationale 7 and went to find a prostitute. She is quite a moral, prudish person, and yet she didn’t hesitate to help him when he asked. She saw that it was normal and important to him.”Uneasy Riders was shot in a real home for the physically disabled.

Sinapi used a mix of professional actors and disabled people. Some of the disabled people played characters with a different disability. He filmed it on non-intrusive mini cameras and shot it all in a few weeks. The result, which lies somewhere between Dogme and documentary, hilariously captures the simmering anarchy arising from the pent-up sexual tension reigning in the home.In one scene, René and his nurse are browsing in a sex shop. She wheels him round, plucking things off the shelves for him to look at as if they were groceries in a supermarket But René’s seen it all before. “I’m sick of threesomes,” he moans, making her stretch higher, to the videos on the very top shelf.This is a film about a man who just wants to get laid but whose disability is getting in his way.

Sinapi dramatically shatters the myth that disabled people aren’t sexual beings. And already, Uneasy Riders has won four major awards.”I’ve always been shocked by this concealed refusal of others that starts with a total denial of their sexuality,” says Sinapi. René’s predicament is a universal one, but the idea that a disabled person may want to have sex or visit a prostitute is rarely acknowledged.Spod is a London-based agency that works to aid the sexual and personal relationships of people with a disability. “I know it happens,” says director Simon Parritt, “but it does require someone who is quite feisty to get it to happen.

But if you’re not feisty and you haven’t got the money, then you’ll just have to suffer in silence. There are some people whose impairments prevent them even from masturbating – it’s not going to happen without assistance, so why should you have to pay £80 a time? The law is ambivalent: while prostitution isn’t illegal, the care worker could be found guilty of procurement, or pimping. But to change the law to say that disabled people should be allowed to do this would be to say that disabled people are different and that would be stigmatising them.”The release of Uneasy Riders is timely, and will have resonance for many British disabled people. Paul, from Kent, is 37, and was partly paralysed by a car accident in 1984, in which he broke his neck. Many of his friends of a similar age have died without ever having had a sexual experience in their life. Paul got so fed up with the lack of sexual activity, he posted a naked picture of himself on the internet. “I received some positive e-mails from men who fancied me, even though I am straight,” he says.