Sébastien Pelletier | First Impressions

I talk to 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 13^th (Leicester Square), 14^th and 19th (NFT). It will get a nationwide theatrical release on 150 screens across the United States with Disney/ National Geographic beginning next week on October 4th. An extraordinary achievement for a documentary.

Leo, Colin, Laurent, Mia, Sebastien Pelletier, a local sherpa, and Edith Lemay take a brief rest while trekking to the Poon Hill viewpoint in Nepal. (Credit: MRC/Jean-Sébastien Francoeur)

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 canvas their children for a bucket list of activities and they set out to make them come true by taking a year off and travelling to Africa, South Asia and Latin America. It’s a moving film, one that successfully avoids all the obvious traps — it’s not a travelogue, it’s not an infomercial on a disease, it’s not emotionally manipulative. It is however a very touching film, beautiful to look at, about family, parenthood, childhood; and resilience in the face of the unavoidable.

The Pelletier family (from left): Mia, Sebastien, Colin, Edith Lemay, Laurent and Leo in Kuujjuaq, Canada. (Credit: National Geographic/Katie Orlinsky)

In the podcast I talk to Edmund Stenson about the making of the film, his working process with co-director Daniel Roher (of Navolny fame) 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 33^rd 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.

The podcast may be listened to here: