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MINOR ATTRACTION

By Amelia EVANS

Documentary - Post-Production 2022

A human-rights-lawyer-turned-filmmaker attempts to craft empathetic portraits of three people with pedophilic desires who claim to have never sexually interacted with a child—and want support to keep it that way.

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- NEW ZEALAND, USA
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Amelia EVANS
- Producer(s)
- Letisha TATE-DUNNING
- Synopsis
- MINOR ATTRACTION opens with an immediate disclosure of the filmmaker’s motive: that by failing to create space for people who struggle with pedophilic desires to acknowledge them and seek support for them, we might be creating the very conditions of shame and isolation that enable abuse... Can she find people who might make us empathize with their struggles, so that we might want to see them be treated with more humanity and—critically—offered more support and access to services that could prevent abuse?
  
  Drawing on her experience as a human rights lawyer looking for “perfect plaintiffs,” she seeks out individuals who acknowledge an attraction to children but say they have never abused a child. . Despite finding peer-support groups where she speaks to dozens of men and women who meet these criteria—all of whom use the term “minor attracted person”, as they reject the term “pedophile” because of its popular connotation of having harmed a child—just three people are prepared to take the risks of speaking openly on camera.
  
  The film traces her time spent journeying alone across the country and living in the spare rooms of each of these three men. Beyond the fact that they have all been attracted to children since they were children themselves, the men have little in common. Paul is an acclaimed contemporary dance choreographer who was once named Chicagoan of the year; Gary lives off the land in Oregon overseeing a small church congregation with his wife; and Ben* writes science fiction from a small apartment above his mother’s house.
  
  Despite the risks of participating openly in the film, the men are disarmingly honest when talking about their attractions. They detail the struggles they’ve faced in resisting their sexual impulses, the changes they wish society would make to better support them, and the ways they analyze their desires. Their views, which are occasionally disturbing, sometimes hopeful, and almost always in tension with each other, shine a light on the inner workings and frustrations of having an unwanted sexual attraction.
  
  But the more the men open up to the filmmaker, the more problematic each one seems, and the more impossible the original quest for empathy becomes. By the end of filming—which took place over four years—one of the men faces allegations of sexual abuse by a former foster child, another says something so unsettling (on-camera) that the filmmaker cuts off filming, and another takes his own life.
  
  The film closes by reflecting on the failures of the film project itself: why had she expected the men to deliver empathetic performances, rather than to challenge the audience to reflect on the costs and danger of our failure to be empathetic? This leaves the filmmaker—and it is hoped, the audience—asking: if there had been a way for these men to speak more openly about their struggles and find the support they needed, could the sexual abuse, grief and suffering documented in the film have been avoided?