Their Kids Are Going Blind, So Adventurous Parents Took Them On A Journey Around the World: Remarkable ‘Blink’ To Premiere At Telluride
EXCLUSIVE: About 50 minutes into Blink, the National Geographic documentary that’s about to make its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, the Lemay-Pelletier family boards a gondola in Ecuador and begins a spectacular descent down a steep mountainside. But then the gondola jerks to a sudden stop.
The film directed by Edmund Stenson and Oscar winner Daniel Roher (Navalny) documents the family’s incredible travels around the world – hiking in the Himalayas, hot-air ballooning in Egypt, surfing in Indonesia, on safari in Namibia. But on the gondola, the adventure comes to a perilous halt: hour after hour passes. The light fades to total darkness, with no sign of rescue.
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“Why did it have to be us?” one of the kids asks with growing alarm. “This can’t be real. It’s a nightmare.”
The enclosing darkness stands as a larger metaphor for the family from Québec. They have embarked on this global journey because three of their four children are going blind: Mia, age 11, Colin, 6, Laurent, 4; only Léo, age 9, has been spared the incurable genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa. Parents Sébastien Pelletier and Edith Lemay conceived the voyage as a way to fill their kids with extraordinary visual memories before Mia, Colin, and Laurent lose their sight completely.
The film, a production of MRC, Fishbowl Films, and EyeSteelFilm, will be released by Walt Disney Studios in 150 theaters in the U.S. and Canada beginning October 4. Watch the Blink trailer below.
“It’s a testament to familial strength and resilience in the face of adversity,” Stenson says of the story. “Yes, the diagnosis is visual impairment-specific, but it’s really a more broad story about what do you do when the world throws you something? How do you respond? How do you react?”
Pelletier and Lemay financed the trip through family savings, eschewing fancy accommodations in favor of hostels and stays with host families. One-percenters they are not.
“They’re solidly middle class,” Roher notes. “They were able to prioritize this because it meant so much to them and their family, and facilitate this trip in a way that they could afford because they’re not absolutely wealthy people. There’s no intergenerational wealth here. And I think that’s reflected in both their trip and the experiences that they were able to share with their children — being in the culture, being in people’s homes, [the kids] meeting kids their own age, really feeling like they are connecting with a different place at the most intimate level.”
The children created a bucket list of things they wanted to see and do: watch a desert sunset, drink juice while riding a camel, go horseback in Mongolia, make friends in other countries, sleep on a train. That “to-do” list shaped the itinerary.
“It was always the kids that would, for the most part, lead the parents,” observes Stenson. “I think it’s beautiful that it was the kids that offered that to the parents.”
Roher, who was occupied promoting Navalny as Blink was being filmed — and about to start a family with his wife, filmmaker Caroline Lindy — ceded the role of trekking with the Lemay-Pelletier family to his longtime friend and film collaborator, Stenson.
“As we were in production for this film, I became a father and it was sort of this stunning coincidence that I was making a film about parenthood and the lengths the parents will go to for their children while Caroline and I were starting our family,” Roher tells Deadline. “And that’s one of the primary reasons why Ed did the bulk of the principal photography and traveling with the family because Caroline and I welcomed our baby boy Gideon into the world. But it was very special and meaningful to sort of get this master class on parenting via the dailies that were coming in that I was screening and spending time with from home while Ed was off on this wonderful adventure.”
It wasn’t just the adventurous quality, but the character-driven nature of Blink that drew National Geographic’s eye to the project.
“We came on board about 18 months ago,” notes Carolyn Bernstein, EVP of global scripted content and documentary films for NatGeo. “The film team had been shooting just for a few months at that point. And we had gotten to know Daniel and his producers, Diane Becker and Mel Miller, on the campaign trail when we were out with Fire of Love and they were out with Navalny. And even though we were competitors technically, we all became really good friends and kind of constant companions. It was really fun. And once they won the Oscar for Navalny and beat us, I said, I must have Daniel’s next film. So, we came on board.”
Bernstein adds, “I always say that our brand is focused, but it contains multitudes. We talk about gripping stories that inspire a deeper connection to our world. I can’t think of a better example than Blink.”
National Geographic has premiered some of its most acclaimed documentaries at Telluride, including Free Solo, which went on to win the 2019 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature; The Rescue and Torn in 2021, and The Mission last year.
“I think, honestly, it’s as much about the appeal of Telluride for our filmmakers as it is the appeal for us,” Bernstein says of unveiling films in the Rocky Mountain enclave. “There’s something particularly special about world premiering at a festival that is really a kind of pure celebration of cinema, of the power of storytelling. Not only are you in this incredibly beautiful place, but for the filmmakers, they’re really surrounded by other best-in-class filmmakers, whether you’re a doc filmmaker or narrative, whether you’re first time or incredibly veteran. Everyone is mixing and mingling and connecting with one another in a way that feels unusual and special.”
The Lemay-Pelletier family will be on hand for the Telluride premiere, along with the filmmaking team, including Roher, Stenson, and producers Melanie Miller and Diane Becker. (To avoid any risk of re-traumatizing the family, they may wish to skip the 12-minute vertiginous gondola ride that links Mountain Village at higher elevation with Telluride in the box canyon below).
“There’s no better place to premiere this film than at Telluride. It was our first pick from the very beginning,” says Roher. “It’s a dream come true for both of us.”
Adds Stenson, “It was always the dream to be at a place that was so representative of the family too, for this adventurous kind of excitable family. It just felt like the perfect place. I know the family too are dreaming of it and to be there with them and celebrate with the whole team, it’s incredible.”
Watch the Blink trailer below.
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