Here is a desperately moving and beautifully made documentary about a gentle hero who deserves greater recognition. Patrick Lydon, born in Massachusetts to an Irish family, returned to the old sod during the early 1970s and ended up, with his equally inspirational wife, Gladys, establishing the innovative Camphill Community in Ballytobin, Co Kilkenny. Allowing people with special needs notable dignity, the project eventually inspired 16 further such communities in Ireland.
If a talking head, intercut with stills, merely read the story to a static camera, the result would be enough to trigger choked sobs. Éamon Little does much more than that. As the director was beginning to plot the project in 2021, Lydon was diagnosed with motor neuron disease; as a result, Born That Way ended up as both celebration and valediction.
Intercutting lovely archive footage with crisp shots of contemporary Arcadia, the edit moves seamlessly from biography to a discussion of rights often denied children with exceptional needs. “Their issues are not health issues,” Lydon says. “They are who they are.”
As a scholarship student at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he became obsessed with Dostoevsky’s humane wisdom in The Brothers Karamazov and carried those teachings through his life at Camphill. He moved on to Yale and landed a draft number that would probably send him to Vietnam on graduation.
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Having covered Woodstock for the New York Times, Lydon had every chance of a career in rock journalism, but he decided to have a spell in Ireland safe from recruitment. He ended up staying 50 years.
An engaging talker, traces of his American background now faint, Lydon tells his remarkable story as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Gladys, an equal partner, is on hand to flesh out personal and professional details.
She is particularly moving about Georgie McCutcheon, an invaluable housemate who, useful with others around, slipped into torpor when she left the house. “It’s my centre,” he said when asked what was wrong.
Born That Way, winner of the Dublin Film Critics Circle prize for best Irish documentary at Dublin International Film Festival, is just the sort of doc that might pick up a cult following on domestic release. The tragic, but hopeful, close is entirely free of mawkishness.
