Oliver Sacks: His Own Life 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 accepted his work only decades after the fact.
Sacks was a fearless explorer of unknown mental worlds who helped redefine our understanding of the brain and mind, the diversity of human experience, and our shared humanity. When diagnosed with terminal illness, that same fearless forensic inquisitiveness instigated a desire to examine his life and end of life through film.
Within a month after receiving the fatal diagnosis in January 2015, Oliver Sacks sat down with film maker Ric Burns for a series of filmed interviews in his apartment in New York City. For eighty hours, surrounded by family, friends, and notebooks from six decades of thinking and writing about the brain, the octogenarian talked about his life and work, his abiding sense of wonder at the natural world, and the place of human beings within it.
The film features exclusive interviews with Sacks conducted just weeks after he received a terminal diagnosis, and months prior to his death in August 2015, and nearly two dozen deeply revealing and personal interviews with family members, colleagues, patients and close friends
Traumatised by his mother’s revulsion of his sexuality, Sacks became homophobic and had to overcome 35 years of celibacy, drug addiction, and often, despair. Yet Oliver’s overwhelming curiosity and compassion led him to become a clear sighted clinician who wrote casebooks of such clarity that they could be read and understood by non clinicians.
In his practise, as in his writings, he thawed the cold from the clinical bringing the warmth of humanity to sufferers of maligned minds and aberrant brains. His unique ability to communicate in an avuncular vernacular with a light top dressing of a light top dressing of clinical expertise engaged millions and this film emulates the style and charm of its subject.
Sacks has made a career of sharing the secrets of his consulting rooms and here he shares quite candidly the secrets of his own personal life, including the episode that may titled The Man Who Mistook a Jello for a Saucy Fellow.
A truly fascinating and inspiring film, OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE is an exhilarating tribute and testimony to the remarkable life and career of Dr. Oliver Sacks.