Mike McCahill 

I Am Breathing – review

A documentary about one man's experience of motor neurone disease is sobering and moving, if not as much as his own writing, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

Neil Platt and his son Oscar in the documentary I Am Breathing
Not enough time … Neil Platt and his son in I Am Breathing Photograph: PR

This sobering documentary stands as a memorial to Neil Platt, a Harrogate-based architect and new father who, at 33, was diagnosed with debilitating and terminal motor neurone disease: we're essentially watching a man disappear before our eyes. The directors' intimate domestic images only occasionally match the humour and ruminative poetry of their subject's own, blog-published words, but ghoulishness and undue sentimentality are kept at bay: one last, quiet peek around the subject's bedroom very movingly suggests what has been lost. The running time perhaps does the greatest justice to Neil Platt's life: it feels nowhere near long enough.

 

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