Sarah Barton: Defiant Filmmaker

By Dov Kornits

“The people that see the film tend to get divided into two groups: There’s people who know nothing about disability, or very little, or have a nebulous connection; for them the film tends to be a complete revelation, like ‘Oh, I didn’t even know there was a disability rights movement’.

“And then there’s people who are more embedded in the disability community and they just love seeing the stories on screen and the way that we’ve woven the international story together.”

The film is Defiant Lives, a feature length documentary about the global disability rights movement, which premiered recently at the Sydney Film Festival. The filmmaker is Sarah Barton, who has been documenting the disability sector since the early ‘90s, with her 1994 film, Untold Desires, produced by Oscar winner Eva Orner, winning SBS’s first ever Logie.

“I’ve been making films about disability for more than 20 years,” Barton tells us.

The obvious question: what’s her personal connection? “I have a daughter with a disability, but I’ve been doing films for longer than I’ve had my daughter. Maybe she was an inspiration to go back… but my interest in the field predates her birth.

“I’ve always felt a real connection with disabled people because of their community. And now, with my daughter growing up, it’s her community.”

For so long, hidden behind closed doors, disability has never been as visible as it is now, and it’s not because we finally figured it out.

“The disability rights movement was so little known about and there’s this whole activist community that have been lobbying and protesting and putting their names on the agenda for decades now in the same way that the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s movement.”

It’s the activists who are front and centre in Defiant Lives, rather that parents and carers, which makes the film all the more powerful. “There are a million films you could make about this story and I’ve made just one,” says Barton, also acknowledging that most of her subjects are physically disabled rather than intellectually. “I was interested in those activists who changed the thoughts of others.

“I’ve met and worked with quite a few people who are self-advocates in the intellectual disability space,” Barton continues. “We’ve got people who are in that space and I tried to give a sense that there is crossover and they are working in the same space to some extent. We tried to make a film that would appeal to a broad audience and I wanted the intellectual rigor around the ideas, and I think a lot of people with physical disabilities have also advocated on behalf of all people with disabilities. That’s not to say that people with intellectual disabilities can’t advocate on their own behalf, because they can, but as a filmmaker it’s a different kind of challenge to tell a story with a lot of people with intellectual disabilities.

“There are so many questions you could ask around, ‘what do you think should be in this film’, which is maybe why others haven’t gone there before me.”

With the NDIS in the headlines and being rolled out right now, Defiant Lives proves to be an accessible, inspirational, eye-opening and practical entrée to a social movement that may not have been as sexy for news channels to cover in a meaningful way in the past.

“It’s incredible how much change has happened just in the six months or so since the film was finished. In America, you’ve got a complete change of focus because of Trump. People are devastated; in the UK, the cuts that the conservatives were weighing in with before the election were terrifying to disabled people and people were dying. People have been galvanised in the last six months in the UK and America. I think in Australia it’s very different. We’re galvanising around getting the NDIS right; we have something to work towards.”

Defiant Lives is being released via Demand.Film, with various screenings in place around Australia from July 17, and the hope that people and organisations will host many more. “Demand is a platform that’s based on getting people to go there and order screenings and book tickets. We’re pretty involved. We’re not going to sit back and expect somebody else to make it happen. Living with disabilities, life’s not like that.”

For bookings and information visit www.defiantlives.com.