I have been seeing a documentary listed on Netflix for a while now. The title and picture looked like something that was going to be pretty awful, but I was bored last night after the kids went to bed, so I turned it on.
It is called: A Mother's Courage: Talking Back to Autism (although looking it up now, it seems this title might not have been the original. "The Sunshine Boy" seems to have been the original, and makes more sense, as the film focuses on the film maker's son)
There were a bunch of interviews. Several experts. Some families that were just getting diagnosed, several that had multiple children diagnosed. A school that, I believe featured Floor Time.
Then it focused more on non-verbal, low functioning kids. The mom/documentarian's son (Keili--they're Icelandic) was 11, nonverbal and low functioning. It talked some about his history and current schooling and functioning. They included several bits of asking kids and teens who used AAC what they thought about a few different things. I thought that was cool, and it was getting a lot closer to the overall point of the documentary, which was communicating with nonverbal autistic kids. I thought it was quite cool that they actually included at least some bit of interviews with the people they were focusing on.
Then it introduced a lady named Soma Mukhopadhyay, an Indian woman whose son has severe, nonverbal autism, but he types and writes and has a super genius IQ. She has been teaching other kids the way she taught her son. They all agreed that it would only work with a highly auditory learner. The type that usually fails at PECS and other visual methods. Several interviews were with parents of kids who had learned to type through it.
Anyway, overall, I thought it was a good documentary. Not anything at all like I thought it was going to be from the title and picture.
21 May 2013, 9:03 pm
