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Depot Docs: "The Boy in the Bubble:" Days of Miracle and Wonder?
By James O'Barr
We are living in a golden age of documentary film. Compared to strictly commercial filmmaking, documentaries typically have far lower budgets, and the advent of affordable lightweight digital video cameras, computer based editing equipment, and DVDs, has made them financially viable even without a major theatrical release. The number of high-quality, feature length documentary films has increased exponentially over the past twenty years.
Philipstown is lucky to have a number of documentary filmmakers making their homes here, and luckier still that they have banded together to bring us Depot Docs, a program of documentary film showings attended by their creators, and even their subjects, in its inaugural season at The Philipstown Depot Theatre in Garrison.
The third film in the series, "The Boy in the Bubble," shown on Thursday night, was a considerable departure in tone and reach from the first two offerings- Stephen Ives's heartmelting, award-winning "Amato: A Love Affair With Opera," and the very funny "Al Franken: God Spoke." Originally shown on public television's American Experience, "The Boy in the Bubble" documents the life of a child who became a living experiment in an effort to cure a rare disease.
Produced and directed by John Maggio and Barak Goodman, the film tells the story of David Vetter, born with a rare hereditary disease- Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)- which left him defenseless against infection. David spent his entire life (he died in 1984, age 12), in a sterile isolator, a plastic "bubble" that provided a germ-free environment.
With the outcome known from the beginning- the story was closely followed in the popular press, and, after David's death, provided a title for a hit song by Paul Simon, and a gag for "Seinfeld"- it is a testament to the filmmakers' skillful and sensitive treatment that they are able to keep the audience fully engaged, even, along with the participants, hopeful of a scientific breakthrough, or a miracle. But whether such hopes, high at the outset, then tragically crushed in the end, are a legitimate basis for risky decisions about matters of ultimate consequence, is a big question that Barak and Maggio, in "The Boy in the Bubble," carefully and movingly set before us.
Next on the Depot Docs schedule: Thursday, May 10, 7:30 pm, "Hearts and Minds," 1974 Academy Award winning documentary about the Vietnam war, with director Peter Davis; Thursday, June 28, 7:30 pm, "Two Square Miles," about the city of Hudson, NY, and the opposition of locals to a multinational Swiss cement company, with director Barbara Ettinger and editor Toby Shimin, Cold Spring's own.
Depot Docs is hosted by Stephen Ives, whose latest film, "New Orleans," was recently premiered on PBS.
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