Filming the freak show

Filmmaker Richard Butchins tells Kelly Mullan why BAFTA snubbed his new documentary

Ebullient documentary-maker Richard Butchins (pictured) gets his subjects to relax by making them laugh and sending up his disability – a left arm paralysed by polio – with tall tales of botched attempts to juggle kittens.

Richard recently had 15 minutes of fame when Corrina Downing, BAFTA’s events manager, refused to screen his work in progress, The Last American Freak Show, at a joint screening with the London Disability Film Festival X08, as it made her feel uncomfortable.

“Ha! That’s so patronising. Discrimination is implicit. Disabled people shouldn’t be opinionated or clever. They should collect trolleys, stuff envelopes and not go out because they get in the way, especially if they’re in a wheelchair. Everyone should spend a week in a wheelchair: with only one arm, I’d go round in circles.”

Freak Show follows six disabled and four non-disabled carnival performers on a six-week tour of the US. The BAFTA screening was to be an opportunity for Richard to find funding to complete the film but he is “barrelling on regardless”, and says: “I see rejection as a time saving exercise.

Quite frankly they did me a favour. If you tell people they’re not allowed to see something, they want to see it.

“TV is like a freak show; it’s about gawping. My film is about gawping as a way of slipping another message underneath. [The troupe] have taken control of the way they’re looked at. They go on stage and say: ‘If you want to look at us, pay $10.’ People think that exhibiting yourself for money is fine unless you’re a cripple. But these performers are doing it willingly and know what they’re doing. The trouble is there’s an assumption that if you’ve a disability, you’re stupid.

“The film will work largely because the establishment don’t think it will...It’ll be successful. It’ll be a cult film. You make something with passion and belief and hope it gets to the zeitgeist. The younger generation – late teens, early 20s – are so different from people 20 years ago. They’re the first generation to grow up with no sense of discrimination. They don’t care if someone’s black or disabled or a woman or whatever.

There is less stigma now [in the film industry] – but there’s still discrimination. Disabled people are seen as not as capable. In fact, I can do anything any other film-maker can do: most of it better.”

Richard is now working on two documentary ideas and courting interest in a feature film. “I had to make Freak Show to explore my relationship to my disability but I want to move on from here. I’m inspired by struggle and by revelation. I’m bursting with ideas and I’m always looking for collaborators.”

• www.angelsstandcorrected.com; www.last americanfreakshow.com