Oliver Sacks: His Own Life review - a complex portrait of a complex man theartsdesk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theartsdesk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
April 9 on PBS
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
Friday, April 9 at 9 p.m. on PBS, at pbs.org/oliversacks and on the PBS Video app. The two-hour film explores the life and work of the legendary neurologist and storyteller as he shares intimate details of his battles with drug addiction, homophobia and a medical establishment that embraced his work only decades after the fact.
Oliver writing on porch, 2015
Photo Credit: Bill Hayes
In February 2015, a few weeks after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, Oliver Sacks sat down with Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns for a series of interviews in his apartment in New York City. For 80 hours, surrounded by family, friends and notebooks from six decades of thinking and writing about the brain, he talked about his life and work, his abiding sense of wonder at the natural world and the place of human beings within it. Drawing on these deeply personal reflections, as well as interviews with close friends, family members,
At the helm of the documentary is Emmy-winning filmmaker Ric Burns.
Burns was invited into Sacks’ life in 2015, weeks after Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
“From the start, this project has been one of the most moving and revelatory I’ve ever had the privilege of being involved with,” Burns says. “From the moment my colleagues and I walked into his apartment on Horatio Street in New York in February 2015, it was clear that virtually every issue of importance about what it means to live a life and to be a human being was concentrated in his unusual life story: survival, beauty, art, science, storytelling, love, individuality, difference, dignity, autonomy, agency, wonder, language, meaning, consciousness, community, friendship, yearning, loss, connection with something larger.”