A Prayer Before Birth
A drama based on the director's experience of coming to terms with multiple sclerosis, ‘A Prayer Before Birth’ chronicles, with disturbing intensity, the physical and emotional traumas of a young woman's journey from able-bodied exuberance to the acceptance of disability.
Rejecting the objective worthiness often associated with such subject matter, the filmmaker opts instead for an escalating sequence of symbolic and impressionistic images to convey the increasing sense of unreality as the disease inexorably enters into daily life. From the moment when grasping hands burst from the ground to pull down the heroine, Marsha, as she runs through the park, to her dance with the mannequins, the film communicates her anguish and isolation and charts the psychological effects of MS. Abrupt camera pans and tilts, lyrical superimpositions and fast-paced editing combine to evoke the unpredictable take-over by disease of a body which will no longer “do as it's told”. These dislocated cinematic rhythms highlight by contrast the harrowing scene when the static camera stares unblinking at Marsha's utterly frustrated attempts to eat a meal while her limbs refuse to co-operate.
‘A Prayer Before Birth’ confronts debilitating illness with creative vitality, simultaneously desperate and defiant.
Description source: publicity materials
