A Space in Time

A Space in Time is a candid, lyrical, intimate portrait of one family’s struggle to transcend a merciless, fatal childhood disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which in turn becomes an unlikely celebration of the disabled life, the life cut short. The film carries us through an up-close, poetic and frank portrait of the family surviving and thriving through the ups and downs of the disease, as we see Theo and Oskar’s gradual transition from walking to greater wheelchair dependency, both through their eyes and the eyes of their parents, Nick and Klara, and how the latter learn to cope with the inevitable reality of losing their sons to an illness that currently has no cure. Disability is often poorly portrayed or misrepresented, its depiction seeking to elicit sympathy, a sense of tragedy, or worse still, pity, which helps neither someone living with disability nor someone living without it. Children, in particular disabled children, see this all too clearly, their thoughts and actions often revealing and expressing aspects of their experience as ‘disabled’ far more clearly and wisely than the usual outpourings of pity from the ‘abled’. Need a disabled person’s life be necessarily tragic? According to the social model of disability, is not a disabled person disabled more by their environment than their condition? And why are the able-bodied so often unable to see beyond the disability a person suffers from, and witness instead an individual who leads a rich and varied life, their disability just one aspect of them. The artistic intention is to remain as true to the family’s experience as possible, telling the story through a range of materials and techniques –actuality, interview, personal archive and stylized, atmospheric & impressionistic vignettes – in order to bring to light the complexities, challenges and intricacies of what the family face, but also to shine a light on disease and disability. A Space in Time is the story of a family seeking to transcend disability, with the two young boys at the heart of the film, and their parents, ultimately left to wonder whether their rare disease and disability – their difference from the rest of us –is not a weakness but instead a superpower, something extraordinary.