Antony Butts.
Filmmaker and futurist.

I’ve lived for a year on a former Soviet nuclear test site, followed the people building a separatist administration in Donetsk, and spent five years developing future scenarios and strategic games at Dstl, the UK Ministry of Defence’s science laboratory.

I connect unfamiliar possibilities to ordinary motives. Who would want this? What would persuade others to join in? How could it become normal, and what would living with it mean?

For After the Apocalypse, I spent a year living in communities on Kazakhstan’s former nuclear test site. In DIY Country, sustained access to the people building the Donetsk People’s Republic let me follow the friendships, ambitions and power struggles through which a new political order took shape.

I’ve filmed and directed more than 25 broadcast documentaries, alongside commissioned work for Save the Children and Greenpeace. Four years in Russia, a year in Kyrgyzstan and a year on the test site, all working in Russian, taught me to stay long enough for people to become themselves in front of the camera.

Close collaboration with NGOs also runs through my broadcast documentaries, including Kidnapped Brides in Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine’s Lost Children.

My recent filming work includes bespoke client commissions.

My work in West Africa includes research in Mali on farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) in the Sahel. I developed an agent-based model of how the practice spreads and presented it at Beating Famine Sahel in Bamako in 2019.

In foresight, I develop scenarios, design fiction and exercises that explore how technologies and social changes could produce new ways of living: who benefits, who pays, who becomes dependent, and how the arrangement changes as it spreads. At Dstl, I designed and facilitated strategic games for government and NATO audiences, co-developed and taught foresight methods, and worked on future trends. I’ve also written 30,000 words for the reports of the MoD’s Futures Centre.

I studied physics at Imperial College and Russian at Moscow State University, worked in credit derivatives at Financial Security Assurance and RBS, and took an MSc in Security Studies at UCL while making films. I’m also a quantitative modeller: statistics, system dynamics and agent-based modelling, at Dstl and in private consultancy. Based in Hastings, UK; working internationally, in English and Russian.