“Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go,” a movie about a UK school for children with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, will air on US television 28 July 2009 on P.O.V. The film, made by Kim Longinotto (pictured at right), features the children and staff at Mulberry Bush School in the Oxfordshire village of Standlake. P.O.V. (Point of View) provides “documentaries with a point of view.”
Variety describes it as a film “mixing ferocity with tenderness, delicacy with tenacity”–exactly like the unusual school it explores. In Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, one of Britain’s leading documentary filmmakers takes a verité look at Oxford’s Mulberry Bush School for emotionally disturbed children. Mulberry’s heroically forbearing staff greets extreme, sometimes violent behavior with only consolation and gentle restraint. Kim Longinotto’s unblinking camera captures an arduous process and a nearly unhinged environment, but it also records the daily dramas of troubled kids trying to survive and the moments of hope they achieve with Mulberry’s clear-eyed staff.
Link to the US PBS site, where one can learn when the entire film will be available in different areas. Visit the Mulberry Bush organization’s Web site. See the UK’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) listing for the Mulberry Bush School. Link to an extended piece, “Inside the home for angry infants: It costs £123,000 a year to send a child to this special school — because nobody else will have them,” by Caroline Scott in the Times Online (11 May 2009). Learn about other P.O.V. shows.
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