For years I lived a block from a residential group home for adults with developmental disabilities, people who typically had spent years in institutions beforehand. Some stayed at home, others worked at sheltered industries. I waited each morning for the bus with two residents, both with Down's Syndrome, who crossed town to Goodwill each day. The woman was shy: quiet and stable. The man was mercurial. Some days he was calm and friendly. On others he was angry, tearful, frankly delusional at times. Sometimes I was able to `talk him down' as we waited. Now and then he remained so agitated he had to turn back alone toward home. Another man had cerebral palsy. At his best he was gregarious and inquisitive, drawn to visit if he saw me working in the yard. At his worst he was aggressive, and eventually he had to leave the home for assaulting others. What amazed me was the pluck these people showed, echoed by the perseverance of the staff. Surely conditions at the home were far superior to the grim realities of institutional warehousing, anomie, and passive vegetating I had seen on medical school `field trips' in the late 1950s.
Sueno House, in Santa Barbara, California, is such a residential home. Mr. Matossian is on the staff there. Using digital video, he shot footage for this film over about a year, following three of the seven or eight residents. We have more fleeting contact with the others, notably Scott, a gentle fellow who worships one of the principals, Tim Staab. Tim S. has Down's and is an obsessive cigarette smoker. He has stolen cigarettes from stores and written bad checks to get them. For these misdeeds he is on probation and court ordered to live at Sueno House. He also has a devilish sense of humor, loves to tease, and can escalate quickly from benign pranks to aggression, which has landed him in state hospitals in the past. His situation clinically is the least complex of the three principals.
Laura Langston, on the other hand, carries diagnoses of Fetal Alcohol, Tourette's and Williams' Syndromes, autism and OCD. She lived in a state mental hospital continuously from age 10 to 20. Abused physically and sexually as a child, she now vacillates between intense desires to be a woman or a man, to live in heaven or on earth, to live or to die. She has prolonged spells of shouting, jerking her arms and biting herself, and is drawn to religious rituals to find calm. She also melodramatically exaggerates and is manipulative. Tim Warriner is 47. Cerebral palsy left him wheelchair bound with mild spasticity of all four extremities and mild retardation. He has severe congenital malformations of both hands - he was born without thumbs - and had reconstructive surgery when young to reposition one finger to create an appositional thumb on one hand (the procedure failed on the other hand because of gangrene). Physically abused as a youngster, he witnessed his violent estranged father shot to death by his stepfather. He also is alcohol dependent and when drinking will not accept any degree of responsibility for his frequent angry outbursts and related misconduct, invariably blaming others.
Staff are mostly young college age kids, like the ones on my street were. They are calm, respectful, very clear and unambiguous in their communications, remarkably longsuffering in their efforts to aid the residents to get along as best they can. We watch the three principals struggling over the months to manage interpersonal conflicts and their own ambivalent impulses. We see the staff, in response, constantly struggling to strike a balance between honoring the rights - the civil liberties - of the residents (and letting them suffer the consequences when they screw up) versus setting limits for their safety and improved harmony for others. We suffer through Tim W.'s worsening bouts of drinking and consequent eviction. We ride Laura's emotional roller coaster, including a possible overdose of chemicals and a four-hour Tourette's rant. We follow Tim. S. through a crisis when he refuses to stop pestering Scott, and police are called to take him away, face a court hearing, and spend a weekend in jail, his first such experience.
This film gives us a slice of the life lived by residents and staff: it's the real deal. Still, life at Our House, like anyplace, is not without sweet moments of tenderness and even humor. Scott's simple, patient devotion to Tim S. is touching. One day a long harangue ensues between the two Tims over who is dumber. Each acknowledges without chagrin that he suffers from retardation; the question is, who's worse off. It's difficult to convey here how poignantly funny the scene is, and when a staff member confronts them about what they are doing, it's clear that the Tims can see the humor of it too.
There are a few problems. Some viewers have raised an ethical question about the making this film: did Matossian and his colleagues exploit their charges? I think there are hints of this in the filming of at least one person, Laura. Matossian, behind the camera, often asks questions of the residents as he films their responses. In Laura's case, I thought he asked some provocative questions (already knowing the answers) in order to evoke emotionally charged responses from her that would demonstrate her faulty self control as well as her conflicts. For me, this did cross an ethical line a few times. At the end of the film, on printed stills, we learn of events concerning all three principals in the subsequent year after filming. The course of each is remarkably positive. We are informed that Tim. W. has been abstinent from alcohol for 8 months in his new, more controlled group home, that Laura is having fewer tic attacks, that Tim. S. is succeeding at a new job in the community. It would have been useful to demonstrate these improvements through brief follow up interviews.
What stays with me after viewing this film is the same sense I had about folks at the group home down my block. I'm struck by the courage and perseverance of the residents - their steadfast desires to be good people and live well - and of the staff who try to aid them. Sueno House is named for the street it's located on, but it's well to recall that this Spanish word means dream. The people who live at Sueno House, like all of us, dream dreams of a better, more satisfactory life ahead. It's a difficult path they walk toward fulfilling those dreams.
Sueno House, in Santa Barbara, California, is such a residential home. Mr. Matossian is on the staff there. Using digital video, he shot footage for this film over about a year, following three of the seven or eight residents. We have more fleeting contact with the others, notably Scott, a gentle fellow who worships one of the principals, Tim Staab. Tim S. has Down's and is an obsessive cigarette smoker. He has stolen cigarettes from stores and written bad checks to get them. For these misdeeds he is on probation and court ordered to live at Sueno House. He also has a devilish sense of humor, loves to tease, and can escalate quickly from benign pranks to aggression, which has landed him in state hospitals in the past. His situation clinically is the least complex of the three principals.
Laura Langston, on the other hand, carries diagnoses of Fetal Alcohol, Tourette's and Williams' Syndromes, autism and OCD. She lived in a state mental hospital continuously from age 10 to 20. Abused physically and sexually as a child, she now vacillates between intense desires to be a woman or a man, to live in heaven or on earth, to live or to die. She has prolonged spells of shouting, jerking her arms and biting herself, and is drawn to religious rituals to find calm. She also melodramatically exaggerates and is manipulative. Tim Warriner is 47. Cerebral palsy left him wheelchair bound with mild spasticity of all four extremities and mild retardation. He has severe congenital malformations of both hands - he was born without thumbs - and had reconstructive surgery when young to reposition one finger to create an appositional thumb on one hand (the procedure failed on the other hand because of gangrene). Physically abused as a youngster, he witnessed his violent estranged father shot to death by his stepfather. He also is alcohol dependent and when drinking will not accept any degree of responsibility for his frequent angry outbursts and related misconduct, invariably blaming others.
Staff are mostly young college age kids, like the ones on my street were. They are calm, respectful, very clear and unambiguous in their communications, remarkably longsuffering in their efforts to aid the residents to get along as best they can. We watch the three principals struggling over the months to manage interpersonal conflicts and their own ambivalent impulses. We see the staff, in response, constantly struggling to strike a balance between honoring the rights - the civil liberties - of the residents (and letting them suffer the consequences when they screw up) versus setting limits for their safety and improved harmony for others. We suffer through Tim W.'s worsening bouts of drinking and consequent eviction. We ride Laura's emotional roller coaster, including a possible overdose of chemicals and a four-hour Tourette's rant. We follow Tim. S. through a crisis when he refuses to stop pestering Scott, and police are called to take him away, face a court hearing, and spend a weekend in jail, his first such experience.
This film gives us a slice of the life lived by residents and staff: it's the real deal. Still, life at Our House, like anyplace, is not without sweet moments of tenderness and even humor. Scott's simple, patient devotion to Tim S. is touching. One day a long harangue ensues between the two Tims over who is dumber. Each acknowledges without chagrin that he suffers from retardation; the question is, who's worse off. It's difficult to convey here how poignantly funny the scene is, and when a staff member confronts them about what they are doing, it's clear that the Tims can see the humor of it too.
There are a few problems. Some viewers have raised an ethical question about the making this film: did Matossian and his colleagues exploit their charges? I think there are hints of this in the filming of at least one person, Laura. Matossian, behind the camera, often asks questions of the residents as he films their responses. In Laura's case, I thought he asked some provocative questions (already knowing the answers) in order to evoke emotionally charged responses from her that would demonstrate her faulty self control as well as her conflicts. For me, this did cross an ethical line a few times. At the end of the film, on printed stills, we learn of events concerning all three principals in the subsequent year after filming. The course of each is remarkably positive. We are informed that Tim. W. has been abstinent from alcohol for 8 months in his new, more controlled group home, that Laura is having fewer tic attacks, that Tim. S. is succeeding at a new job in the community. It would have been useful to demonstrate these improvements through brief follow up interviews.
What stays with me after viewing this film is the same sense I had about folks at the group home down my block. I'm struck by the courage and perseverance of the residents - their steadfast desires to be good people and live well - and of the staff who try to aid them. Sueno House is named for the street it's located on, but it's well to recall that this Spanish word means dream. The people who live at Sueno House, like all of us, dream dreams of a better, more satisfactory life ahead. It's a difficult path they walk toward fulfilling those dreams.