My Flesh and Blood

An Audience Award at Sundance several years ago, or maybe it was the Oscar nomination, was enough to make me put this documentary on my Netflix queue, but I imagined something excessively heartwarming or icky, so it lingered around the 180th position as newer releases leapfrogged forward. Then one time, running my eyes down the user ratings on my queued films, the four-plus stars for this caught my eye and I moved it up. And thus I finally caught up with Jonathan Karsh’s superbly moving film about Susan Tom and her adopted brood of a dozen special needs kids. The special needs run from horrific diseases to accidents to birth defects. There’s a boy with CF and ADD, and another whose skin peels off from EB while he also battles CA. There’s a bright young girl whose face was burned away in a crib fire and a bouncy tween whose body just happens to be legless. Such damage is hard to look at, but if you force yourself to do so, you will begin to see a glimmer of light, a refracted radiance through the pool of tears in your eyes. The film follows the lives of its subjects in being sad but funny, desperate but hopeful. Susan Tom herself is a great character and not a plaster saint, which is confirmed in the essential extras on the Docurama DVD -- including deleted and additional scenes, and an especially worthwhile dialogue between director and subject. This is a film that cries out for a sequel, like the "7 Up" series. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-78.)