In a village that never knew sickness a boy is sent into the wilderness to find the cure to his illness. He returns from his great journey to a village that does not recognize him for the changes he has endured.
They have no way to cope with his transformation or understand the message he brings back from his great journey. The boy is expelled from the village and forced to lead the rest of his life in a secluded wilderness.
Until one day, much later, the village sends out a young warrior to find the Boy and bring him home. It is time. They are ready to hear his story.
Are you ready to hear his story?
Summary
‘Surviving the Treatment: The Return of Myles McLellan is a documentary about a child with a brain tumour who returns to a community unable to accept him for the changes he has endured. Through storytelling, he is able to reconcile himself and his family as he goes to great lengths in order to share his experience with his community.
Artistic Concepts and Ideas
Our civilization is based on storytelling. Great truths can be communicated, encoded in familiar structures and archetypal characters. It is a wonderfully insidious way of teaching and of raising consciousness. A society is defined by its history, by the collection of stories it has chosen to remember and re-tell, shaping its members’ thoughts and perceptions. This is why it is important to use storytelling to help restore balance to our world, politically, environmentally and culturally. In a world ruled by change and uncertainty, everyone needs to do their part to restore hope to a world that is in great need of healing.
Myles McLellan lost his fight with cancer and died this month, on the week of his 13th birthday, from a recurring brain tumour. In his short life, he was determined to tell his story, one which has a great impact on the way other children with cancer will lead their lives. I was fortunate enough to be a witness of the last year of his life and document his journey.
Myles’ story relates to my previous fictional films, which centered on individuals who were socially marginalized. Storytelling allows us to approach subjects that can be difficult to understand and gives us insight into how to deal with them. Storytelling has been my method of communicating the need for understanding and acceptance, which is why I’m documenting Myles’ journey. It is my goal as a filmmaker to incorporate storytelling back into the community as a tool for teaching people about our differences.
At age 21, my desire to address issues of the social isolation of the individual began to take shape. I met, and started managing, Raul, the “Superdancer of the World.” Raul was a 69-year-old Inca Native from Peru who danced on the streets of Toronto, giving free shows to the city’s inhabitants. Intrigued by this man and how those around him perceived and treated him, I began to study how being different can be a precursor to neglect.
All my films to date have dealt with protagonists who were marginalized by their communities for their differences. I began working with this theme when I wrote and directed the play “Dancing with the Fool” (Tarragon Theatre 1996) and the short documentary “The Superdancer of the World” (3min. 16mm, 1996). Both of these were about my relationship with Raul as I looked for meaning in his absurdity and his struggle as a refugee, which paralleled my own life and artistic dreams. I continued my thesis on tolerance with the fictional short films “The Invisibility Complex” (3min. 35mm, 1998), about a marginalized man taking extreme measures in order to get noticed; “The Shadow and the Clown” (12min. 35mm, 2002), about a clown who tries to get away from his shadow; and ‘The Fool’ (28 min. 35mm, 2005), which follows an imaginary friend who questions his existence when a child no longer believes in him.
When I befriended Myles, I immediately saw that his story reflected my fictional characters, who mediated a world that did not accept them. Myles’ world is real, his school, peers, family and friends are all actual manifestations of the worlds I created in my fictional films. I was overwhelmed by the parallel between my imaginary world and Myles’ real one. I saw this as a viable cross-over from my experience in narrative dramatic storytelling to a non-fictional story employing the formal tools of the documentary format.
Surviving the Treatment: the Return of Myles McLellan illustrates the strength and human spirit of a young boy with a brain tumor and the difficulties he experienced re-integrating into a community that did not know how to accept him after the physical changes wrought on him by the cancer treatments.
Storytelling
In many ancient cultures, storytelling was as essential to communities as science and art. Storytelling enlightens the world around us as well as the world within us. Through storytelling, we can approach subjects that are beyond our understanding and gain insight to help us deal with them.
Within a classical three-act story structure, there is always a three-step process, referred to in mythology and ancient cultures as the ‘Initiation’. Initiation is the process which forces us to look deeper into our selves in order to gain a greater understanding of our own lives. We are all linked to this initiation through our ancestral ties. Wherever we come from, whatever religion or race, we are all linked to the storytelling of our past. In the first act, the hero is separated from everything he or she knows. In the second act, known as the great ordeal, the hero is forced to face death or hardship. In the third act, the transformed hero returns to his community with a new message. Members of the community then incorporate this new knowledge into their own lives. In Myles’ story, the first two steps are present; he was separated from his community and faced hardship and the real possibility of death. What is missing in his journey, and often missing in our fast-paced society in general, is the third step, which is the one step that involves the community. This essential step, which relies on the understanding and acceptance of the community, is not taking place, yet it is crucial for our evolution as a society.
In this story, Myles went through his great initiation, was separated from everything he knew and faced death first hand. He was in a coma for three weeks, fighting cancer, a hero in every respect. Except he returned to a community that did not know how to acknowledge this kind of heroism. The sleepovers, the soccer games, the play dates had all stopped. Myles came back from this great initiation and nobody knew how to deal with “the return”. His parents, Wayne and Susan McLellan were left on their own to try and integrate Myles back into the world. Susan told me that when Myles went through the cancer treatment, her son died and in his place came a new boy, a wonderful boy, but a new boy. At the time, I was struck by this haunting visual of Cancer stealing this child from his mother and leaving a new child in his place. For months during the filming, I thought about what Susan told me and I looked for some sort of explanation. As I told Myles’ story and learned about his initiation, I began to understand Susan’s great insight. His initiation was so great that he was transformed, physically and mentally. A great storyteller with a strong heart was born among us. Yet there was no one to listen. This is the importance, the social significance of this documentary. Through Myles’ journey, we will learn how we can play our crucial part in the healing of those children who come back from their great ordeal to face the world. It is no coincidence that the third act of a great story requires community involvement. The film will change the way society perceives those that are living with cancer, creating a vehicle of awareness for those children. We can learn to help them integrate back into the community. Our message: learn from Myles’ story so no child will have to go through what Myles did.
