The Butterfly Circus

The years of the Great Depression. A circus company travels a ruined America, playing town to town. They stop at a fairground. There is a tent of oddities there and a man with no arms or legs is displayed inside; his name is Will and the crowd looks at him and laughs. Méndez, who owns the circus, speaks to him. What he says is not consolation; he turns around what the man thinks about himself. Will joins the company. But to have a place in a circus he needs something he can do, and nobody knows what that is. Joshua Weigel directs and wrote the script with Rebekah Weigel. Eduardo Verástegui, Nick Vujicic and Doug Jones are in the cast. It is a short film; it runs twenty minutes and was made within The Doorpost Film Project. Nick Vujicic, who plays Will, is not an actor; he was born without arms or legs and speaks around the world. After it was published online it reached very high viewing figures and was translated by admirers into more than twenty five languages. The matter it treats is the direction of the gaze; the same body is a thing to mock in one tent and a performance in another. The period design and the camera work are above the scale of a short. Its limit is length; the narrative is compressed into twenty minutes and the change passes quickly. Another limit is register; the intent to inspire is plain and some sections too flat. Who it is for: viewers who like short films and narratives grounded in hope. Who it is not for: the message is delivered directly, it is brief, and the emotional steering is high.