Xavier Alford’s striking documentary explores the lives of people at different stages of coping with Guillain-Barré syndrome – including himself
A neurological horror story lies at the centre of Xavier Alford’s chilling, stoic and finally revitalising documentary, part of the BBC Storyville strand. Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare condition that can strike without warning, where the immune system attacks the nerves, sometimes leaving the victim completely paralysed. “A passenger in your own body” or “a weird wormhole – you dream all the time” is how one person interviewed sums it up – though he subsequently recovers.
But director Alford has to suffer a second horror: knowing his fate. In his case, Guillain-Barré syndrome is progressive over many years, palsying the outer extremities first – we first see him struggling to grasp his camera. Being, as one clinician points out, “the sort of person who wants to know”, Alford resolves to learn as much as possible about what awaits him. In what is obviously a therapeutic quest, he spends the film meeting other people in different phases of this chronic neuropathy.