My sister, Lisa, is a master at tight book reviews. Following in her footsteps, yet diverging into film, I’m setting out on a parallel path.

Filmmaker and performer Jeremy Xido’s documentary Sons of Detroit, has just won the Director’s Award at the Sedona International Film Festival. Sons of Detroit is stunning. Moving. Funny. Heartbreaking. And healing by proxy. If such a thing can be entertained. Xido’s 1960’s revolutionary parents moved the family to Detroit’s Chandler Park neighbordhood and went back to saving the world. Jeremy, often left on his own, became the white “cousin” of the loving black family that became his village.

After a two-decade absence, Xido returns. His “cousin” Boo has just been released from 20 years in prison. The leafy neighborhood of well-kept single-family homes of his memories is a skeletal testament to what was.  Xido sets out to find out what happened to Boo, to the black family who raised him, to the neighborhood, and ultimately to himself.  Xido’s interview with his parents (now deceased) will have you holding your breath. The tears will come of their own accord. For Detroiters, Sons of Detroit will have special resonance. Please don’t miss this movie.

 

Zoe is pure fun .  The film’s eponymous heroine is total mess. No life skills outside of shopping, partying and being a fair-weather friend and romantic partner. Forty-two is fast approaching. Along comes a wizard who offers her one wish. After much characteristic dithering, Zoe articulates something the wizard can work with, crafting for her three lives from which she is expected to find her answer. If she cannot decide from among the three, she must live with the wizard forever. Like I wrote above,  Zoe is pure fun.

 

 

Ethan Bloom offers yet another take on the Jewish-boy-doesn’t-want-to-be-Jewish theme. Instead of studying for his Bar Mitzvah, Ethan Blooom is secretly studying to convert to Catholicism. Ethan  loves everything about the Catholic religion.  He rides around town on his scooter wearing a white confirmation robe. He is the none-the-wiser priest’s star student (natch, he’s Jewish after all.) He has an altar in his room dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

Ethan’s father is beside himself with Ethan’s cockamamie obsession. In the opinion of his too-much-info-giving kookie grandmother this is simply an adolescent phase. You know the moment of truth must arrive and it does: with four spare and searing words uttered by his shocked and betrayed father. For now, that’s all I’ll write about this sweet and utterly enjoyable film. Except to say that the last line of Ethan’s Bar Mitzvah speech is worth the price of admission.

 

 

 

Dancer/Choreographer Jenn Freeman was 33 when she received a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Her life fell to pieces even as all the pieces of her life that had confounded her began to make sense. Freeman’s father filmed much of her childhood and adolescence. There was no way then they could have seen what the viewer now recognizes through the lens of ADS.   Jenn’s constant twirling from an early age was stimming, short for the self-stimulating repetitive behaviors, that helps those with ADS self-soothe and calm the overwhelming input so constant in their lives.  Jenn was fortunate her self-stimming behaviors led to the dance lessons became her lifeline.

Born to Move traces Freeman’s journey as she rewires her sense of self. Examined in reverse, her life begins to make sense even though life as she now knows it only becomes knowable one day at a time. At one point in the movie she muses, “Every day is a new day because I am a new person in it.”

The film is riveting. Jenn Freeman’s courage in allowing the camera access to her journey is a gift. The world is richer when the non-neurodivergents make room for those born to move in their own way.

 

 

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