At the end of last year we got a call about an aunt of us who came by our house earlier that day. That day she was complainingn about a headache and as she was walking around her house she suddenly collapsed. The ambulance was called and it turned out there was blood in her brain. To support the rest of the family we decided to head to the hospital and wait for the doctors to save her. It were a couple of very tense hours in which you think about a lot of different outcomes. When the surgery is successful how long will it take for her to wake up and if that happens will she still be the same? Has there been damage making her unable to do specific things? It was a strange experience and although they did managed to save her she remained in a coma for a while. Eventually she woke up and didn’t have a lot of negative effects (except for her short term memory). When you experience something like that personally you realise something like that could happen to anyone. It was the reason I was very interested in checking out this documentary, available through Netflix.
34-year-old Lotje Sodderland was a very social and very active woman who had a strange feeling in her body after a night out with her friends. She couldn’t talk anymore and felt like she was dying. She decided to go out of her house and was eventually found, unconscious, in a nearby hotel. She had a stroke which had a lot of impact on her vocabulary. She has difficulties finding the right words and lost her ability to read. Besides that she sees the world differently (literally), because the right side of her vision looks warped and has different colors. As she can’t rememeber anything she asks a friend to film her, hoping that will give her something to hold on to and live her life.
A big inspiration for her is David Lynch, who she regularly mentions and writes to. It’s also clear in the way My Beautiful Broken Brain is presented (he’s alos the executive producer). Visually it tries to show how Lotje experiences the world and because it is so different, just like the movies Lynch makes, you can’t really call this a normal documentary, as it has a sense of being experimental. The quality of the footage varies greatly. Regularly footage is shown Lotje shot herself on her iPhone, but there are times when footage is shown which is high quality, shot with a professional camera. The goal of this documentary is obvious, to visualise her world, but even though it succeeds the documentary itself didn’t manage to move me as much because of the presentation. I’ve never been a Lynch fan, but his influence is obvious and that might be the reason I couldn’t really get into it.
