For Cameron S. Mitchell, director of Disposable Humanity, the award-winning documentary confronting the Nazi murder of disabled people, the recently released movie is more than just a film. It represents a counter-memorial and a call to join the revolution, he said.
The documentary uncovers previously unseen information and historical artifacts revealing how Aktion T4 developed the killing methods, gas-chamber technology, and trained personnel necessary to implement the Holocaust. The film follows the Mitchell family’s investigation into the history and memory of Aktion T4, documenting how the Nazi regime first tested and developed its system of mass murder on people with disabilities.
Disposable Humanity had its Oscar-qualifying theatrical engagement this summer at Laemmle Monica Film Center in California. The global premiere was held September 4 at Positive Exposure Gallery in Manhattan and featured a question-and-answer session with Mitchell and Executive Producer Steve Way, the disability rights advocate and actor whose well-known work includes roles on Hulu’s Furious and Ramy.
A broadcast of the film will be available and continue to air until September 30th, with tickets available at disposablehumanity.com/watch. A two-week-long showcase of Disposable Humanity will be available on Film Independent’s website September 14 – 28. After that, information will be available on the film’s website on viewing options.
Winner of the Slamdance Audience Award, RiverRun International Film Festival’s Director’s Award for Community Impact, and the Ridgway Independent Film Festival Director’s Choice Award, Disposable Humanity was also nominated for Best Documentary of the Year by the Midwest Film Journalists.
“Disposable Humanity is not just a film; it is a film counter-memorial,” Mitchell said in a statement. “By confronting the brutal legacy of Aktion T4, we seek to raise awareness about the contemporary implications of viewing individuals through a lens of disposability and its impact on disabled people.”
In an interview with Able News, Mitchell shared his early inspirations and his goals for the film’s impact.
Tell us about your backstory and when you first realized you wanted to make films.
That story is the story of my film Disposable Humanity, funnily enough! I didn’t realize it at the time, but when my folks took me to Germany when I was in fifth grade, my head was full of movies. The End of the Affair remains one of my earliest memories (my folks often let me watch films…beyond my age group we’ll say) and then seeing The Matrix really sealed the deal for me that I wanted to do something to change the world. I just didn’t know it was movies yet. So, when we went to Germany and encountered our first Aktion T4 memorial, I immediately sat down and drew the experience. I drew a lot in my early days; it was a way that I could process the world as a neurodivergent kid. It let me sit with the subject–often art, statues, whatever I was compelled by–but this time when I sat down to draw I began to create a story. It was the story of my family encountering a memorial to killed disabled persons while being told that the memorial itself wasn’t accessible. That memory stuck with me all the way until now–at the age of 35–and still stirs me and guides me in a lot of what I do.
Was there a specific movie that sparked your interest?
The films of reflexive documentarians and visual anthropologists such as Cannibal Tours by Dennis O’ Rourke and Sherman’s March by Ross McElwee.
You, along with Steve Way, are spearheading the movement for more authentic representation. Can you take us through the thought process of why you felt this should be your debut project?
Well, for me this was always going to be my first feature film. I think I knew this very early on, once I started taking courses on Visual Anthropology in college at Temple University. I loved the code of ethics that Visual Anthropologists held themselves to: the idea that a film made about a community ultimately had to involve that community.
Cameron S. Mitchell, director of Disposable Humanity. Photo credit: Bushwick Film Festival.
Shifting power dynamics and taking them back from colonialist filmmakers. Acknowledging the power of the camera, the “gaze” so to speak, and the idea of the camera as an interlocutor of subjects both filmed and filmmaker. Disposable Humanity has a lot of influences but if I were to highlight some, I would cite Cannibal Tours by Dennis O’Rourke where he turns the camera on his own boat of tourists visiting Papua New Guinea, the film, Sherman’s March, by Ross McElwee where the filmmaker intertwines personal familial narrative and politics with a historical retelling of General Sherman’s extremely violent march through the South, and the films of Errol Morris such as The Thin Blue Line and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. for the filmmakers’ portrayals of legal grey zones and outlier individuals of questionable ethics.
All of these films in a way helped me process what I had been holding onto since I was a little boy, that moment where we discovered T4 as a family and what that had meant and continued to mean to me. Imagine growing up reading the Diary of Anne Frank and Maus and seeing all of these incredible artistic renderings of atrocity and never seeing the fact that the Holocaust started with disabled people? I mean, what is there really to process there? Everything. I’m still processing it, in a way. Which is why when I first saw Steve touring with the film Good Bad Things, I knew I had to try to have him board the film. Here is someone who has been advocating, campaigning his whole life in a way that I felt I had also done or tried to do in some way, and then using that platform to raise awareness while being funny. I really connected with that and felt like if he saw the film, he would get it. And so I convinced him to watch a VERY rough cut of the film and he did. He got back to me immediately.
Watching Steve talk about the film since, in fact every time we do it together or apart, I am amazed to see the growth and perspective that comes with it. It really speaks to the power of the subject matter and how the title of the film, Disposable Humanity, will really never go away until we fully embrace and speak about this erased and forgotten past that literally catalyzed one of the most talked-about atrocities in human history. Imagine, we even removed disabled people from that. And that’s why I think the more people that see this film, the more its message gets out there and we can start to try to comprehend how entirely and systemically we eradicate disabled people from the conversation every day until that changes. Until we remember.
From a personal standpoint, how did you emotionally cope with the heaviness of the topic? Did it make it difficult to complete?
Making the film was the coping. Making the art gave me hope and shifted some of the unbearable weight of this knowledge – which really is the heaviness, knowing that so many do not know this past or chose not to know it – out into the world. If a film is made, then we can no longer deny that someone came forward and said “Hey, why do you think only doctors were allowed to pull the gas nozzle? Where did gas chambers come from? How can we keep ignoring that disabled people were the first to be killed and the last to be remembered?” Someone has to do something about this.
What message do you hope audiences take from your work?
Whether or not people engage – the record will show that this film won the Unstoppable Audience Award at Slamdance and a Grand Jury Honorable Mention and that it was nominated for Documentary of the Year. Also, it was featured in Forbes and Medium. That it sold out multiple premieres and screenings. No longer will there be plausible deniability that “people just didn’t know”. Because I don’t know if you’ve seen us on social media, but we have left a massive imprint. And a call that needs to be responded to. We are saying “Hey! Disabled people are the canaries in the coal mine of mass atrocities so you can continue to ignore them at your own peril or join our revolution and start saying that we’ve had enough.”
Lastly, do you have any future projects that you can give us a hint about?
Yes, next I’d like to develop my first narrative feature. It is wild and imaginative and is a bit like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest mixed with Sorry to Bother You. Looking for residencies and investors for that, so if you’d like to support my work, please contact me through my website www.cameronsmitchell.com.