When we look at the night sky, we take the stars for granted. In the movie Blink, a Canadian couple Édith Lemay and Sebastian Pelletier, finds three out of their four children-Mia (7) and her 2 younger brothers Colin, Laurent-are diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that will eventually rob them of their sight and the ability to see the stars. “That’s the first thing they’ll never be able to see and there is no going back,” Édith said. They are told by the therapist to fill their children’s visual memory with as many images as possible from photographs and books. But as moving as pictures are, they lack the sensory inputs like sound, smell, touch, vastness of scale or wind.
“I thought, ‘I’m not going to show her an elephant in a book; I’m going to take her to see a real elephant,” Édith explains. “And I’m going to fill her visual memory with the best, most beautiful images I can.” So they give their children the license to create a bucket list of all the places or things they wish to do and the couple sets out to create a once in a lifetime journey which will span the globe from Mongolia to The Amazon Rain Forest.
Losing precious time to the global pandemic they begin their journey in 2022, after countless revisions, “We actually left without an itinerary,” said Édith . “We had ideas of where we wanted to go, but we plan as we go. Maybe a month ahead.” Sébastien was in charge of logistics, spending hundreds of hours scouring blogs, reviews and travel sites. “Even on the road, he’d hunch over his phone late into the night in darkened hotel rooms so as not to wake the kids or wait hours on board a bus for a few bars of cellular service.”
But this is not another family travelog ; rather it is an exploration that challenges our conventions of what blindness is and the resilience and acumen of children of any age. We also see the parents’ view of the tragic diagnosis change as they observe their children’s reaction to and transformation by their spectacular and somewhat challenging surroundings of Annapurna Mountain Range (Nepal) or The Egyptian White Desert. “We wanted to chart both the parents’ and our own transition from grief at what was lost to acceptance of and curiosity about the beautiful future which lies ahead,” Directors Edmund Stenson and Daniel Roher pointed out. “We live in a world that gives privilege to vision, but the children Mia, Léo, Colin and Laurent have the tools to lead rich, meaningful, yet crucially different lives because and not in spite of their condition.”
They decided to take ground transportation to minimize their impact on the climate by choosing guest houses and home stays instead of hotels. It also gave the kids a special chance to live with distant and different cultures, interacting with the playmates and even the pets of the places they visited. My favorite being the children of the rainforest. Where the soccer ball, one of many they left behind in their travels, became a common currency understood by all. In another scene when Laurent is playing soccer, five year old Laurent breaks down crying because he can no longer see the ball in the waning light of early evening. But when they put the ball by his foot he kicks a “goal” and the grief is gone for the moment.
But of course it was not all sweetness and light as the family faced personal and physical challenges. Whether it was five year old Laurent asking “what does it mean to be blind?”, or everyone fearing for their safety, hung by a cable hundreds of feet in the air trapped in a small tram in Ecuador. Suddenly the tram is being pelted by rain and their dwindling water supply must be rationed as day turns to night with no help in sight.
To me the director’s greatest accomplishment was to somehow have the kids be themselves, unconscious of the camera or the crew. The focus and as the directors admitted, the angle of the camera, was most often shot looking up from the children’s perspective. And when the parents talk directly to the camera, it is always heartfelt and revelatory.
It goes without saying that the natural vistas created by the director of photography Jean Sebastien Francoeur and the directors are stunning and the best reason I can say to view this on the big screen. But even the small quiet moments are breathtaking like Édith asking Mia if she wants to travel in the future even if she can’t see the Egyptian White Desert they are camped upon. And without delay Mia says, “For sure.” “Even if you can’t see?”, Édith asks. “I can play with sand, Mia responds.” The movie ends on a surprisingly upbeat note as the kids blindfolded are being taught how to navigate obstacles with canes. For adults it would be the first step down a dark road. For the kids it is an adventure; a challenging new fun game. Laurent, who was heartbroken when he had to abandon a dog named Bella in Nepal, now has a seeing eye dog he is being trained with, which has him giggling with joy.
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