“I may be ugly and deformed, but I want to be an honest, fair man,” says Dima Polyakov, staring straight into the camera. He breaks into an impromptu poem about love and solitude, and then concludes with another declaration of his aspirations: “I might never become an actor, but I want to be a free, pure person and never have any nagging feeling inside.”

Polyakov passes the microphone to the meek, bespectacled Misha Vasyanin. “I don’t belong to this world, but I’d like to come into contact with the whole world and the planet,” says Vasyanin, in a high-pitched voice. Lyosha Krykin, who is articulate but stutters, joins the conversation, appeasing Sasha Khavkin who complains Krykin is ignoring him.

The four men, all in their early 30s, have Down syndrome. Avant-garde theater director and experimental video artist Boris Yukhananov is filming their exchanges in a theater rehearsal room for his documentary “Da Dauny,” (Yes, Down Syndrome), to premiere at the Cinema Museum on Oct. 1. The 1-hour, 50-minute film completes Yukhananov s trilogy of documentaries, “Down Syndrome People Comment on the World.”

“They’ve got their own gifts from nature, hidden under the mask of. an illness,” says the ponytailed, 40-year-old director, who was recently invited to address an international congress on Down syndrome in Spain.

In his Studio of Individual Directing, filled with hundreds of videocassettes of his productions, Yukhananov recalls his first encounter two years ago with a woman suffering from Down syndrome. A psychologist friend brought the woman to Yukhananov’s fifth staging of Anton Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.”

“What I saw was an incarnation of the Orchard creature,” says Yukhananov, referring to his theory about the existence of a parallel world in the play, in which creatures living in the orchard in a state of absolute happiness pretend to be real people.

Soon he discovered a group of people with Down syndrome — a congenital disorder caused by an excess chromosome that results in mental deficiency — through a special education school and got them to appear in his subsequent Cherry Orchard productions. The amateur actors and actresses would comment and intervene in the drama, for example, reconciling quarreling characters.

For Yukhananov, the actors with Down syndrome perform in a genuine, pure manner, allowing him to break away from what he describes as a "totalitarian” directing style in which all actors follow detailed instructions. “I wanted to look at the world through their sacred consciousness of eternal children,” says Yukhananov, in black overalls and a sly smile that once earned him the nickname “the black fox.” Now he prefers to call himself “Daun Borya.”

In the first part of the trilogy, “Guided by No One,” the four men talk about the New Testament while looking at European religious paintings at the Pushkin Museum. Like the evangelists, they describe biblical scenes as if they had witnessed them.

“The ignorant people were implacable as usual,” says Misha Vasyanin, pointing at an etching of the crucifixion. “But [Jesus] didn’t worry for his people — he knew that everything on the planet would go as it should."

“I am not teaching or treating them,” says Yukhananov. “More likely, I learn from them. I view them as aliens I need to establish contact with.”

Down syndrome patients are often feared as dangerous by people who are ignorant about the affliction, says psychologist Yelena Nikitseva. But historically, they were considered yurodivyie, or holy fools, who didn’t hesitate to speak the truth — even to as feared an individual as the Tsar. “Thanks to their purity and humility, they have some qualities that we’ve lost long ago,” says Nikitseva. “They are very fragile, and one needs to be incredibly careful introducing them to a world that is beyond their understanding, like art.”