Ghost Boy (Documentary)
Director: Rodney Ascher
Producer: Ryan Bartecki,Gary Levinsohn,Billy Hines,Elika Portnoy
Cinematographer: George Feucht
Composer: Heather McIntosh
Editor: Rachel Tejada,Rodney Ascher
Production Designer: David Offner
Costume Designer: Maranda Nichols Persico
Viewer Advice: Contains themes of abuse.
A SXSW award-winning documentary about one man whose body became a prison, and how he found a way out.
Martin Pistorius, an electronics-loving 12-year-old growing up in Johannesburg, came home one day with a sore throat. But what seemed like a run-of-the-mill bug was the precursor to a living nightmare: locked-in syndrome, a neurological condition in which a person is fully aware of their surroundings but unable to move or communicate. Pistorius would go on to spend more than a decade in a presumed vegetative state in a care home where he encountered horrible mistreatment, until one valiant carer realised that he was conscious – and could tell the world what he’d been through.
Using text-to-voice technology to narrate this stranger-than-fiction story in his own words, Pistorius recounts his experiences of being trapped inside his own body and of life after making first contact, including meeting his future wife, becoming a father and writing an international bestselling memoir. Creatively incorporating recreations of Pistorius’s private world on a Dogville-style soundstage alongside direct-to-camera testimony and archival footage, Room 237 (MIFF 2012) director Rodney Ascher’s SXSW Audience Award–winning documentary is a captivating, poignant account reminiscent of the best works of Errol Morris (A Brief History of Time, MIFF 1992).
“Extraordinary … It manages to humanize the unthinkable, and its subject will continue to haunt you long after the closing credits.” – Deadline