“I’m not a witch”: people with disabilities ask for a boycott of Guillermo del Toro’s film ‘Las brujas’

02:37 GMT on 06.11.2020Short URL

The new adaptation of “The Witches” by director Robert Zemeckis has caused a wave of indignation among the disabled. Under the hashtag #NotAWitch (I’m not a witch) hundreds of mutilated and malformed people accused the tape’s creators of demonizing congenital limb defects.

According to the plot of the film, witches are evil creatures whose goal is to get rid of all the children in the world. Despite adopting the appearance of human women, they actually hide very distinctive characteristics of people with mutilations and deformed limbs.

For example, they hide a malformation similar to the ectrodactilia, a hereditary disease involving the absence of one or more fingers. People with disabilities and associations in defense of their rights did not ignore the controversial detail and filled the networks of publications accompanied by the label #NotAWitch (I’m not a witch, in Spanish).

Thus, the Paralympic swimmer, world champion Amy Marrenhe asked the Warner Bros. studio if it “thought about how this representation of physical disability could affect the disabled community.”

“As the mother of a child with hand differences, I am deeply saddened by the description and consequent stigma of upper limb difference that will be reinforced by the new version of The Witches, from Warner Bros.” Chikipepr.

Warner Bros. did not leave the criticism unanswered. He apologized to all offended people through a statement. The company said they worked with “designers and artists to come up with a new interpretation of the feline claws described in the book. [de Roald Dahl]”.

“It was never our intention for viewers to feel that these fantastic non-human creatures represent them,” the company stressed.

It should be remembered that in Dahl’s novel, witches have “claws for nails” and “square feet without fingers”.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, Las brujas premiered on October 22. It is the second film adaptation of the book by the Welsh novelist, short story writer, poet and screenwriter Roald Dahl. The first is the 1990 film of the same name by British director Nicolas Roeg.