Up Syndrome

I chose this one because my cousin has DS and he's an awesome little dude, so I was interested to see the degrees in which it affects others. I wanted to see what the future maybe was going to be like for my cousin, cause just like Rene, my cousin has trouble speaking. I found myself watching this and smiling a lot because I saw a lot of my cousin in Rene.

Totally low budget kind of thing. I think the Netlix description said he got the movie for the camera from an ebay sale. It starts with old home video footage with a descriptive narrative voiceover and then just goes off and lets Rene do his thing while Duane (his friend and director) follows him around and asks him questions.

This is a documentary in a way that it's just a document of someone's life. It really is just a portrait of his life at the moment. Literally. I think it goes though a year of Rene's life. He's following him around and seeing what he gets into. He goes to the Alamo. He celebrates the 4th of July. He goes bowling. I wonder how Duane went about organizing everything becuase it seemed to be just a hodgepodge of scenes, of him exploring life. I guess he just put it in a chronological order. One comment though, I wish he had cut it out with the additive dissolves.

As I watched, I was hoping more and more that the inevitable update at the end didn't tell me that Rene died at some point in time after the documentary was made (ten years ago). Especially on account of Rene's ominous last lines in the movie. I'm going to spoil it so no one has to go through that. He doesn't die.