In Fly Away, filmmaker Janet Grillo lifts the veil on what it's like to raise a severely autistic child.
As the parent of a child on the autism spectrum, Grillo approaches the topic with compassion, yet does not sugarcoat the experience. She instead has created a raw and complex parent-child love story pulled off brilliantly by actresses Ashley Rickards (One Tree Hill) and Beth Broderick (Sabrina the Teenage Witch).
Rickards plays Mandy, a 16-year-old who can be lovable and charming one moment, and unpredictable and violent the next.
Broderick's character, Jeanne, is struggling to hold her life together and although she toys with the idea of pursuing a romance with her kindhearted neighbor, Greg Germann (Ally McBeal), she decides her life with Mandy is too complicated.
The single mother is also pressured by Mandy's teachers and her ex-husband to send her daughter to a therapeutic residential facility.
Grillo tells TakePart, the story "is about the nexus point when you realize that you can't meet your child's needs, the world must. When your kid has special needs that moment is often fought."
Throughout the film, Grillo's personal experiences shine through. "I didn't wake up every morning to be the mother to my autistic son, I woke every morning to be the mother to my son," she says. "In the film, we approached the character as a person, not a collection of odd eccentricities."
Mandy, she says "is a human being with needs and feelings, she's not 'the autistic kid.' She's a 16-year-old that wants things in her life, but she's got a compromised nervous system and limited ways to communicate it."
While autism is slowly becoming more present in film and TV, Grillo notes that the people portrayed are often mildly impacted or have Asperger's. As an insider to the autism community, she knows this is not always the case. Rarely is the life of a child with severe autism explored in film or TV, she explains.
With 1 in 110 children in the U.S. on the autism spectrum, Grillo says, "If we don't illustrate what the real need is, how can people help us to meet our need?"
Beyond bringing autism to the public's attention, Grillo hopes that viewers walk away from the film having "had an experience of the dimensions of the human heart."
"I'm sharing a deeply human experience of love," she says, "and I think anyone who has loved a child or parented a child can relate to this."
Fly Away has limited theatrical runs in New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. this week and will be in theaters in New Haven, Connecticut starting this Friday. At the end of the month, it will be available on video on demand and DVD.
Comments