Misfits

From polio wards to Belfast streets and TV studios, filmmaker and artist Richard Butchins explores a late, hard-won awakening to his disabled identity. More than a memoir, Misfits explores the relationship between disability, the artist, and society.

Making the case for disabled authorship, he explores who really gets to define reality, who gets believed, and who profits when disability becomes content.

Across our institutions and through his own experiences, Butchins uncovers how disabled people are sentimentalised, suspected, or processed as 'casework', causing suffering and harm. Through hate crime, sectioning, and the quieter violence of disbelief, he exposes how care behaves like containment and how culture writes the disabled author out of the frame.