Mon, Oct 8, 2007
Imagine gradually losing the ability to use your muscles. You're born a healthy baby, but by the time you're a teenager you need 24-hour carers to do everything for you. Imagine knowing that the condition would eventually lead to your early death. What would you do? This intimate uplifting film follows 19-year-old Stuart Wickison who has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, as he prepares to leave the comforts of Treloar's, his special needs college, to study and live independently at university. Although Stuart is nearing death, the film follows him as he pushes himself beyond his limits, to achieve his dreams.
Mon, May 23, 2005
This is a documentary on one extraordinary (even by savant standards) person: Daniel Tammet. Daniel exhibits, aside from the amazing intellectual capabilites associated with savantism, self-awareness of his mental processes and is a relatively high-functioning autist. This is a huge thing, since most savants cannot function or even survive in a society without plenty of support from others. Thus, Daniel receives the immense abilities of a savant, while missing many of the stereotypical drawbacks. Thanks to Daniel's agreement to many cognitive experiments and studies, our knowledge of the human brain and its amazing feats, as well the resulting link to social and neurological problems, is expanding by orders of magnitude. From Wikipedia: Daniel Paul Tammet (born January 31, 1979, London, England) is a British autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematics problems, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy.