autism

The Sunshine Boy (Sólskinsdrengurinn)

by James McNally on September 15, 2009 · 3 comments

UPDATE (September 17, 2010): The film’s distributor in the US, First Run Features, has decided to re-title the film A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back to Autism and is releasing it on DVD on October 26th.

The Sunshine Boy (Sólskinsdrengurinn) (Director: Friðrik Þór Friðriksson): Featuring narration by Kate Winslet and a soundtrack bursting with Sigur Rós and Björk tunes, this documentary about a mother’s search for treatment for her autistic son will likely reach a wide audience, and deservedly so. This still-misunderstood condition affects about 1 in every 150 births now, and seems to be on the rise. Margret Dagmar Ericsdottir was frustrated at the lack of treatment options in her native Iceland and she decided to travel to America with filmmaker Friðriksson in tow to document her search for alternatives for her 11-year-old son Keli. She speaks to autism experts like Temple Grandin and Simon Baron-Cohen, but also visits with families of autistic children who share their own successes and frustrations in coping with the condition.

Eventually, she finds her way to the HALO (Helping Autism through Learning and Outreach) program in Austin, Texas. The program’s tiny and tireless founder, Soma Mukhopadhyay, has developed a technique she calls the Rapid Prompting Method which allows non-verbal autistic kids to develop their communication skills quickly. The results are impressive, and parents report being amazed to discover their children already knew so much, but just couldn’t express their knowledge. Eventually Keli is enrolled in Soma’s program and makes remarkable progress.

The decision to have Kate Winslet read Margret’s narration is understandable, but in the end I don’t think it helps the film. Despite Winslet’s “name” value, the narration removes Margret slightly from her own story, and the scenes where she actually does speak on camera have actually been dubbed by Winslet. Her husband’s voice is also dubbed by an American voice actor, and these scenes really pulled me out of the story. Some scenes of the family shot in Iceland also sort of struck me as having the flavour of a tourist brochure, although it’s hard to point a camera in Iceland and not come up with spectacular images. But the end result was that at several times when I should have been more emotionally invested, something pulled me out of the story.

Autism is a serious condition that has been getting quite a bit of attention from filmmakers lately. The recent release of the similarly-named doc The Horse Boy (review) covers some of the same ground, although the treatment explored in that film was quite different. (Strangely, though, that family lives quite near Austin, Texas as well, and must be aware of the HALO clinic). With the explosion in interest in autism, it’s lamentable that some of the same experts end up saying the same things in several different films. That being said, The Sunshine Boy will reach and educate a whole new audience, and if that helps families who are coping with autism, then the film is a success.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with director Friðrik Þór Friðriksson and producer Margret Dagmar Ericsdottir from after the screening:

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Duration: 10:54

The following trailer was created before Kate Winslet’s narration was completed, so there are a few subtitles.

7/10 (7/10)

Tagged as: #tiff09, autism, iceland

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Over the Hills and Far Away (The Horse Boy)

by James McNally on March 29, 2009 · 3 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs,SXSW

Over the Hills and Far Away (The Horse Boy) (Director: Michal Orion Scott): I was happy to see this film while in Austin for the South by Southwest Film Festival because the family it’s about live in the hill country just outside of Austin, and my companion at the screening actually worked as the father’s masseuse for a while. The film had also just won the Lone Star States award for the best Texas film that day and the crowd was buzzing in anticipation.

We’re introduced at the beginning of the film to Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff, a couple seemingly blessed by the gods of genetics, as they meet and fall in love while both are traveling through India. Then we learn that these two very attractive and intelligent people have had a child and that something is terribly amiss. Rowan, at the tender age of two, is diagnosed with autism. It helps to explain, but does nothing to relieve the terrible tantrums and distant behaviour his parents have endured. Lots of home movies communicate very quickly the tedium that their lives have become, managing this beautiful but mysterious little boy. Then Rupert, a former horse-trainer, noticed something. Rowan seemed to have a special bond with the horses on their farm, and while mounted on a horse, the tantrums almost magically disappeared. Magic, as it turns out, is central to this story. Rupert is also a human-rights worker and journalist who has studied indigenous cultures in Africa and Asia, and he has a special interest in shamanic healing. He puts the pieces together and decides to take his wife and son on a healing journey to Mongolia, home of the reclusive Reindeer People, the Dukha, who are renowned as the best shamanic healers in a land of avid horsemen.

I should mention that by this point, Rowan had seen many traditional medical professionals and was on an onerous regime of medications that didn’t seem to be helping all that much. Although Kristin, herself a psychologist, initially resisted the idea, eventually she decided to support the trip, even if it only turned out to be an adventure for the family. Rupert is more confident than that, and enlists a film crew to document the whole thing. In the Q&A which followed the screening, director Michal Orion Scott said he couldn’t resist the idea, especially because he thought the shamanic healing probably wouldn’t work.

The resulting film is an interesting combination of stunning travelogue, family portrait, and talking head doc about autism. The talking heads are a sore point for me, actually. Esteemed autism experts from Temple Grandin (herself autistic) to Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen weigh in on the condition, with various opinions. The only consensus seems to be that we don’t yet really understand all of autism’s dimensions. By contrast, the Mongolian healers seem to treat young Rowan as if he’s demon-possessed. They speak of evil spirits, and suggest that a female relative on Kristin’s side of the family is still tormenting the boy. Perhaps the director is signaling his own uneasiness with Rupert’s utter belief in the power of these shamans, but it ends up making the film feel a bit muddled.

I won’t spoil the ending of the film, but I will say that Rupert gambles just about everything on this trip. Not only is there a documentary film, but he’s written a book (The Horse Boy) and started a foundation and therapy centre for autistic children where they can work with horses (The Horse Boy Foundation).

Another of my issues with the film is the amount of projection going on. Especially considering that Rowan’s mother is a psychologist, I was amazed that the family seems to make huge leaps in logic when it concerns Rowan’s “bond” with animals, with the animals’ power to heal, and ultimately with the wisdom of indigenous shamans. My reservations were somewhat put to the side by the film’s end, but I still had lots of questions. Unfortunately, they weren’t the sort of questions I could ask in a fifteen-minute Q&A after the film.

Even with my slight reservations, this is a genuinely moving film about a fascinating subject. It also happens to be set in a spectacularly beautiful place. It will be screening at the upcoming Hot Docs film festival here in Toronto, and I’m hopeful that I can get an interview with either the director, Michal Orion Scott, or Rowan’s dad Rupert Isaacson, should either of them make the trip.

Here is the Q&A with director Michal Orion Scott and Rowan’s parents, Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff, from after the screening (the first question is from a young autistic man who was attending the screening with his parents):

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Duration: 14:08

Official site of the film

7/10 (7/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, #sxsw09, autism, parenting

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Autism: The Musical

by James McNally on March 6, 2008 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

(Left to right: Neal, Adam, Lexi, Henry, Wyatt)

Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.

Autism: The Musical (2007, Director: Tricia Regan): Winner of a slew of audience awards at recent festivals, Tricia Regan’s film sheds light on the mysterious world of the autistic child. Autism is now diagnosed in one child in every 150, and comparatively little research has been conducted into understanding it. Serendipitously, there is an interesting article in this month’s issue of Wired magazine, which postulates that instead of treating it as a disease to be cured, we should be trying to understand autism as just a different type of thinking. This documentary might actually help that process. We meet five different children, and their parents, who help us understand the challenges, but also the potential, of being autistic. At the centre of the film is Elaine Hall, mother of Neal and the creator of The Miracle Project, an organization dedicated to arts education for autistic kids. Elaine gathers a group of children each year with the goal of putting on a musical performance. She adopted her son Neal from Russia, and after he was diagnosed as autistic, her marriage broke up. Neal is perhaps the most affected by his condition, prone to tantrums and unable to speak. But Elaine is energetic and positive and at the first meeting, Regan’s camera pans around the room to encompass the curious kids, but more tellingly, the suspicious (and exhausted) faces of the parents.

The film follows a fairly standard chronological timeline, with titles informing us how close we are to opening night. Along the way, we take detours into each featured child’s story, along with the story of their parents. I found each one incredibly moving, and was pleasantly surprised at the complete transparency and gut-wrenching honesty of the parents. Lexi’s parents split up during the course of filming, and her mother’s brutally frank admissions broke my heart. And Adam’s parents, though still together, are having problems that his father admits are partly a result of his wife’s “monomania” in caring for Adam. I think that these people have had their idea of a perfect life turned so completely upside down by their children that they have no masks anymore. It was refreshing and heartbreaking at the same time. As in Lexi’s mom’s wish that Lexi die before she does. With the difficulty of finding schools and caregivers who understand autism, it seemed a reasonable position.

From the children there are several amazing moments of clarity, but the most piercing came from Wyatt, who wondered why all the kids at the Miracle Project were in “their own little worlds” before admitting that he too spent too much time in his own world, mostly because with no one around to talk to, he became lonely in the real one.

The director admitted in her Q&A that she was brought in to direct by the mother of Henry, one of the featured kids (and the only one to have Asperger’s Syndrome, a milder form of autism), who had envisioned making a film to reach out beyond the “autism community” in order to help people understand and to do something. Autism doesn’t attract the resources that childhood diseases like diabetes do, and dealing with it isn’t so straightforward. Like the deaf community, there is a growing “culture of autism” (represented by people like Amanda Baggs cited in the Wired article) who don’t think autism is a disease that needs a cure at all. On the other side are parents of children like the ones in this film, who just want some help. As the number of kids with autism grows, and they grow older and require more specialized care, the educational system will need to adapt. And so will the culture at large.

The finale is as big and emotional as we might expect. But since we’ve gotten to know the performers over the previous hour, we know the show is not going to be flawless. Instead, the creative anarchy that seems to be part and parcel of autism made the performance, and the entire film itself, that much more inspiring.

Here is the Q&A with director Tricia Regan from after the screening (it gets louder after the first few seconds and then louder still at around the 0:40 mark, so don’t turn up your volume right away):

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Duration: 12:12

Official site of the film

Official site of The Miracle Project

9/10 (9/10)