José Arroyo in Conversation with Edmund Stenson, co-director with Daniel Rohar, of BLINK, a documentary which will be premiering at the London Film Festival with three screenings on October 13th, 14th and 19th. It will get a nationwide theatrical release across the United States with Disney/ National Geographic beginning next week on October 4th. An extraordinary achievement for a documentary.
The film tells the story of the Lemay-Pelletier family who discover that their eldest child Mia suffers from a rare genetic disease, retinitis pigmentosa, that will eventually end in blindness. To make matters worse, it turns out that three of their four children suffer from the same disease. What to do? A doctor suggests that they may want to build a memory bank of images their children can subsequently access once they go blind. They canvass their children for a bucket list of activities and they set out to make them come true by taking a year off and travelling in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. It’s a moving film, beautiful to look at, about family, parenthood, childhood; and resilience in the face of the unavoidable.
In the podcast I talk to Edmund Stenson about the making of the film, what a documentary filmmaker does, how narrative is shaped in this form, the contributions of the film editors, the differences between the starting idea and what eventually comes out via filming and editing.
Ed is also a Warwick Film/TV graduate so from about the 33rd minute of the podcast I also ask him about process: how does a film/TV graduate end up as a director of documentaries, particularly as high profile a feature as this one.
