Locked In: Breaking the Silence - Storyville

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Locked In: Breaking the Silence

BBC Four HD

Colette Hodges

Sacha Mirzoeff

Lisa Marie Russo

Poppy Goodheart

Xavier Alford

Storyville: Locked In: Breaking the Silence

Factual: Life Stories

BBC Four - Storyville, Locked In: Breaking the Silence

A film-maker finds the courage to talk to his family for the first time about his illness.

Film-maker Xavier Alford has a rare and life-changing illness. Confronting his fears, he finds talking with fellow patients and his family makes all of them stronger.

An intimate, personal and surprisingly life-affirming story with a rare illness at its heart.

Director Xavier Alford is finally confronting an illness he has been hiding from family, close friends and even himself. Locked In: Breaking the Silence follows him trying to make sense of the mysterious illness that has taken over his life in the only way he knows how - by making a film about it. What is it like to get a diagnosis of an incredibly rare condition that turns your whole world upside down? No-one can tell you why or how you got it, not even doctors. No-one knows how to beat it and there is no cure.
 
To grasp what it means for his body, his career and his family, Xavier meets other people who have a condition closely related to his, Guillain-Barré syndrome, each shining an unfiltered light on the disability caused by the disease. He’s confronted with the seriousness of the condition when some of the patients he meets are on the edge of life, locked in their own bodies, completely paralysed and unable to move a single muscle, while their brains remain unaffected.
 
In a time when much of the world is experiencing lockdown, Locked In offers, with unflinching positivity, a fresh perspective on coping mechanisms and the recovery from virus-related diseases.

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