Handmade Films – The Hurting Strings

Let’s watch The Hurting Strings

I’d like to express my biggest thanks firstly to Peter Lamont for taking this project on and for communicating my invisible message with such perfection even after realising what was going to be a four-minute documentary was turning into something much longer.

And to all of you who either contributed through crowd funding, or supported me throughout this process by giving me great courage to see this difficult task through, THANK YOU. Your support is now spreading awareness for chronic pain around the world.

Director’s Notes

Of the very many things that set humans apart from all else, certainly the most beautiful is our ability to express our lives creatively. If emotions were viscous, then life is the palette for the artist to dip their brush. I can’t count the times an artist has said to me “I need to paint just as I need to breathe”; so what happens when that ability to express is cut short?

The Hurting Strings title occurred to me after thinking about the things Soula created as an expression of her accident and the devastating effects the resulting incapacity had on herself and her family.  Odd yet perfectly fitting in one, the idea of a Marionette dubbed Ms. Soula delivered the title. The metaphor makes it patently clear that the strings that guide our lives are not really ours to articulate and in Soula’s case, they are indeed the hurting strings.

I visited Soula about doing a film on an artist, but as we spoke this other undercurrent kept tugging and pulling and it made me uneasy. It made me uncomfortable enough to change focus and step out of my own comfort zone and in that I found I was in good and plentiful company.

Telling the “I hurt myself and it changed my life” story would, on the surface be difficult to avoid the mundane – after all, people have accidents all the time. The path Soula found to deal with it is anything but ordinary. As her sister Koula says “She found the tools she needed” and in the same way a river finds its way to the sea, the story unfolded as a voyage of discovery and relentless creativity. “No-one will do it for you” is as much a call to action as it is a statement of abject reality.

The film then is one of humanity and being human, the inhumanity of a system designed to avoid yet marketed as help. How selfishness the selflessness are actually one, how the inability to deal with the things we can’t see isn’t through lack of want, it’s through lack of definition.

These are interesting stories. Stories worth telling, certainly stories worth reflection.