A review of The Sunshine Boy: Fridrik Thór Fridriksson’s “incredibly inspiring” documentary about autism
Written by admin2 on September 2nd, 2009Filed under: Themes, Auties & Aspies
The Sunshine Boy has been playing in cinemas in Iceland since January. It will have its international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month. Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet has agreed to do the English narration for the film, and Icelandic musicians Bjork and Sigur Ros will also contribute. The film’s producer, Margrét Ericsdóttir, estimates that the documentary will be released on DVD by the end of the year.
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Iceland Review Online, written in January ‘09:
As my sister and I were waiting for the premiere of The Sunshine Boy to start, standing in the lobby of the cinema, we were approached by a young English-speaking man.
He greeted us and asked us what days we were born. It took him about five seconds to figure out that my birthday, July 12th 1976, was a Monday and that my sister’s birthday was a Saturday. We had no idea whether he was right or not and before we could speak, he had moved over to other premiere guests, asking them the same question.
That was my brief encounter with Taylor Crowe, one of the interviewees in the documentary The Sunshine Boy by Fridrik Thór Fridriksson, a legend of the Icelandic film industry. This is Fridriksson’s sixth documentary and by far his best […]
The documentary follows Margrét Ericsdóttir and her family as they search for new solutions for treating their boy Keli’s condition. Keli is 11-years-old and severely autistic. The help that he receives in Iceland seems embarrassingly insufficient, mostly aimed at making him capable of simple everyday tasks such as dressing and feeding himself.
Ericsdóttir embarks on a journey to the United States and Denmark to meet autistic people who have managed to break out of their prison of autism.
We get to meet incredibly inspiring people in this documentary: Professor Temple Grandin, one of the world’s most famous autistic persons, the aforementioned Taylor Crowe, a graduate in Character Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, and Tito Mukhopadhyay, a writer and poet. Ericsdóttir also meets two American families with three autistic children and we catch a glimpse of how amazingly well these people cope with everyday life.
In the course of her journey, Ericsdóttir discovers the HALO organization (Help Autism through Learning and Outreach) and there she meets Soma Mukhopadhyay, the creator and teacher of RPM (Rapid Prompting Method), a unique method for training autistic children. Mukhopadhyay refused to place her son Tito in a home when he was young and developed a method to reach into his world and make him communicate with others and express himself.
Watching Mukhopadhyay work with autistic children is an extraordinary experience, so Ericsdóttir decides to take her whole family on a trip and introduce Keli to Mukhopadhyay. The audience then watches in awe along with Keli’s parents as Mukhopadhyay discovers a completely new side to Keli.
For those who didn’t know much about autism before will be surprised and saddened when they learn what autism actually is and everybody will be saddened about the fact that in 2009 there are still such limited resources for helping autistic children engage with the world around them. Nobody is left unaffected by this cute little boy called Keli and his mother’s determination to get to know him better.
I left the cinema teary-eyed like most of the other viewers and hurried home to look up my birthday on a 1976 calendar on the internet. I was born on a Monday.
[Story by Ingibjörg Rósa Björnsdóttir, via icelandreview.com]
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Click here to watch the trailer >>
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