“A scientific navigator of the soul”
On receiving his fatal diagnosis prior to his death in 2015, Oliver Sacks, the renowned author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, threw himself into this project in order to make sense of the wild diversity of his life in his characteristically fearless, humanist fashion. Sacks arguably did more than anybody in recent memory to reconcile science and storytelling, biology and biography, the theories of neuroscience and the clinical empathy so necessary for dealing with patients. Drawing on his personal archive, we follow Sacks from his childhood in England through his move to the US. He contained multitudes: weightlifter, motorbiker, speed-freak, musician, painfully shy gay man, ground-breaking clinician, and best-selling author. This documentary packs a big emotional punch in its joyful celebration of one of the extraordinary figures of our time.
“a portrait at once tender and thrilling, a movie that presents us with a man who led an eccentrically defiant, at times reckless existence that was the furthest thing from cunningly planned. He was a wanderer in the body of a clinician, like Jack Kerouac crossed with Jonas Salk. He was that rare if not unique thing, a scientific navigator of the soul.” (Variety)
Ric Burns
Ric Burns was born in Baltimore and educated at Columbia University and Cambridge. He has worked extensively in documentary, sometimes with his older brother Ken. His films include: Coney Island (1991), The Donner Party (1992), New York: A Documentary Film (1999), Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006), Death and the Civil War (2012), VA: The Human Cost of War (2017) and The Chinese Exclusion Act (2019).
