A Kestrel Film
sponsored by the Mental Health Film Council
This film,* sponsored by the Mental Health Film Council, is based on a brief by James Loring, Director of the Spastics Society. Centred around two spastics, Margaret and Willie, the film is a plea for the rights of all handicapped people?the right to emotional and sexual fulfilment, the right to relationships, the right to marry.
Margaret and Willie are lucky; they live in one of the Spastic Society’s mixed-sex hostels where their love for each other can express itself freely. They have the privacy where they can talk together, eat together and sleep together.
Others who appear in the film are not so lucky. Beryl has been engaged for ten years with little hope of ever being able to marry. As this film shows? handicapped people have the same emotional and sexual needs as everyone else. Those who appear in this film speak for all the handicapped when they ask society to understand these needs and give them the chance of a fulfilled life.
*’Like Other People’ is a Kestrel film, directed by Paul Morrison and produced by Irving Teitelbaum. It is available on hire from Concord Films Council, Nacton, Ipswich, Suffolk; hire charge: ?3.50. Print purchase: ?90. 12 Extracts from a review of ‘Like other people’: . . This is documentary at its best, with real people describing and acting out their actual lives…
To make Margaret and Willie?who have virtually no co-ordinated movements and whose speech is in the borderlands of comprehensibility ?into romantic lovers in the tradition of Abelard and Heloise is an achievement indeed, built up from scenes which include the two wheelchairs moving into the setting sun, the ataxic washing of each other’s hair, the clumsy caressing of the body and the (presumed) consummation …
This film, together with a report (A Right to Love? by Ann Shearer) which has just been Published should help to change people’s attitudes to this subject; love, it cannot be said too ?ften, is a thing one cannot have too much of.’ (Richard fox, writing in The Lancet of 20th Ma^l972)
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