INDESTRUCTIBLE
by John Campbell
(link)

Technology has made movies easier to make these days. It’s a good thing too, for there are many stories worthy of being told that do not interest studios’ bean counters. Ben Byer was a bear-like, ordinary bloke, living an ordinary life in Wisconsin when diagnosed in his thirties with what is sometimes referred to as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after the American baseballer. An irreversible motor neurone affliction, its cause is unknown (though just last week Australian scientists announced findings that might bring this understanding a step closer), and it is incurable. What it does is slowly, usually over a period of two to five years, shut down all muscular workings of the body. This challenging, exhausting but ultimately enriching documentary looks at how Ben confronted his illness, how he tried to make sense of it and how he fought it with a rare spirit to the last. It is a phenomenal testament to his courage. The disease has already taken its toll when we meet Ben. His speech is a little slurred and his movements laboured. He laughs and plays with his young son, but in his eyes there is fear and incomprehension. ‘Why did this happen to me?’ they ask. It is the infuriating question that can never be answered for Ben, or any of us. With staunch support from his family, notably father Steve, who accompanies him on his quests with the unseen cameraman, Roko Belic, he travels the world in search of new treatments and, as significantly, in the hope of calming his troubled soul.

From Greece to China, from Jamaica, where through cannabis he at least is provided with some relief of his symptoms, to Israel and the Jewish faith that he abandoned twenty years earlier. Above all else, this film looks at our species’ stubborn unwillingness to accept death. Tolstoy’s ‘the embarrassment of dying’ is alluded to and Oliver Sachs, in conversation with Ben, observes that people’s tendency to recoil from his type of condition is a taught one, that it is not present in children. Philosophising will only get him so far though, as Ben’s inner journey is beyond words. He sheds tears at his dumb fate, but he maintains a capacity to keep smiling ‘til the end, which is poetically dealt with. Inspiring too is the long, long list of donors who kicked in to support the project. Screening on Saturday as part of the Byron Bay Film Festival.