Life Animated
Host sponsor – Main Street Landing
Directed by Roger Ross Williams
USA ⎮ 2016 ⎮ Documentary ⎮ 89 mins ⎮ Open captions
Film Source: Ro*co Films
Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams chronicles the remarkable story of Owen Suskind, a young man with autism who has memorized shelves full of Disney movies and processes emotions and relationships via the characters and storylines in the films. Owen didn’t speak until his parents watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid with him. At that moment, when he tried to talk, they began to understand that Owen was reciting lines from the movie.
From an interview with Ross Williams: “I really wanted Owen to tell the story himself. All too often in films about people with disabilities, the narrative gets taken away from them. It becomes about someone else trying to help them or counsel them. And Owen wouldn’t work as a traditional interview because he wouldn’t make eye contact and it’s really hard to keep him focused.” They tried interviewing him first in a studio but Owen was stilted, looking to his parents for prompts, and the studio made him anxious.
Ross Williams then hit upon using the Interrotron, made famous by Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line, wherein the interviewer talks into one camera and his face appears on a teleprompter screen in front of a second camera placed in front of the interviewee. They set up in Owen’s bedroom at home, with Williams in the next room. “When Owen first saw me on the screen he was mesmerised; he’s spent his whole life looking at screens, and he went completely still. He stared at me. He could completely focus and connect because I was on that screen.”
This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Disability