Wie Ich bin (How I Am)
It is one of those films that you hesitate to watch because you think that you have seen them all. So many films have been made about autistic children, young people and grown-ups. Even Dustin Hoffmann personified a grown up autist in “Rainman”.
And yet this one is different as a first person narrated documentary where we never hear the young Patrick say anything – but through a text integrated into the image we watch what he thinks and is able to formulate via a computer. He defines his own situation, he actually interprets it better than we could have done. At the same time we watch his beautiful open face and his melancholic glance into the camera as if he was wondering why this happened to him. A clever observer of the world and a young man who is able to communicate.
“The written speech is important for me because then I am not so lonely”, is one of his lines, a very concrete one, where many of the others are pure poetry.
Patrick not only observes, he is also trying to take part and it hurts to see how he sometimes stumbles around bewildered and locked into his own world – “please no pity but sympathy”, he writes on the film image in this very well crafted film school diploma work from Zelig in Bolzano.
Wie Ich bin. By Ingrid Demets, Caroline Leitner and Daniel Mazza. 48 mins. 2007 www.zeligfilm.it / http://www.zeligfilm.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=104
