Fly Away: A film about autism, sacrifice, unconditional love

Fly Away: A film about autism, sacrifice, unconditional love
By JO ASHLINE
2011-07-06 22:38:48

I am five minutes into my Friday night flick, Fly Away, when I realize that the woman on the screen looks awfully familiar.

This woman; I know her.

It’s more than just her unkempt hair and the bags under her eyes. I stare at my television screen as she is awakened in the middle of the night by the moans of her adolescent daughter who has Autism, watch as she stumbles into her room, comforts her, and falls back asleep only to awaken too late to get anything done right the rest of the day.

I am mesmerized as I watch her barely get by, over and over again, like some twisted and relentless version of Groundhog Day. I’m moved as I witness her exhaustion, her impatience, her subsequent need for forgiveness as she gives into her anger and frustration. I recognize the sorrow in her voice and the hope in her heart, but most of all I recognize her unyielding love for her daughter, the kind of love that keeps you going even when all logic dictates you should have given up long ago.

Oh yes.

I know this woman well.

Fly Away, written and directed by Janet Grillo, an Emmy Award winning producer and Award winning writer and director, is a full feature film based on Grillo’s short Flying Lessons and tells the story of a single mother, Jeanne, who faces a myriad of challenges as she raises her autistic teenage daughter, Mandy.

Grillo, whose own teenage son was diagnosed with Autism at a young age, says she’s always been “inspired by the boy and not the diagnosis” and harnessed her own experiences with raising a special needs child when going through the creative process, though she adds that Mandy, portrayed exquisitely by Ashley Rickards who is not autistic, is far more impacted than her son ever was.

That’s not to say the first several years weren’t difficult. She recalls feeling “creatively stifled" when her son was first diagnosed, and put all of her focus and energy into healing her son. As he began to improve, she began to feel a sudden surge of creativity: “It was like releasing a ball that’s been trapped underwater; the writing just burst onto the surface and once I started I couldn’t stop."

She wrote and directed her award winning short, Flying Lessons, and realized that the Q and A sessions after each screening were becoming impromptu support group meetings for the parents in the audience. Many encouraged her to tell the story as a full feature and Grillo says she felt compelled to listen.

She was determined to bring Autism to life on the big screen, though she knew it would be impossible to portray all of the characteristics of the Autism Spectrum in one film. “I had to pick the struggles I was going to depict when writing the screenplay; I wanted to show the realities of living with Autism without making the audience so claustrophobic that they walked out of the theater halfway through."

The result is a film rooted in an honesty that is typically the anti-thesis of most Hollywood fare, a film that dares to conjure up a range of emotions within its audience. It’s the movie no one else wanted to make because the main characters weren’t glamorous enough, their conflicts and heartbreak impossible to resolve in an hour and a half.

But thanks to Janet Grillo and a phenomenal cast, it’s the kind of movie that will stay with you long after the credits have rolled, regardless if you are a parent of a child with autism or not.

After all, the movie’s message - that a parent’s love for their child often comes with excruciating sacrifice - is something no parent wants to endure, but so many must face.

To experience Fly Away (what are you waiting for?!), stream it directly from Netflix, order it on Amazon or purchase it through iTunes. For more details about Fly Away, Janet Grillo, and the superb cast, visit Flyawaymovie.com, become a fan on Facebook, and follow Fly Away on Twitter.

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