Handmade Films – The Hurting Strings

What? Haven’t you seen The Hurting Strings?

This award-winning documentary was created by Australian filmmaker Peter Lamont in 2014 and has thousands of views, resonating with so many people living with an invisible illness. It is a little sad that the film still has so much meaning; in fact, it’s still relevant so many years later. I truly wish it wasn’t. 

I remain grateful to Peter Lamont for taking this project on and for communicating my invisible message with such perfection, persisting past his original idea for it to be a short four-minute documentary. To this day, Peter and I remain great friends, and the hug when we catch up is so warm and comforting.

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.