Documentary Blink about epic family trip to experience world’s beauty before kids go blind

NEW YORK – What would you do if your children were slowly going blind?

This is the heartbreaking reality faced by Canadian couple Sebastien Pelletier and Edith Lemay, who have learnt that three of their four children are gradually losing their sight to an incurable eye disease.

So in 2022, the husband and wife from Montreal decided to drop everything and take an epic, year-long, 24-country trip with Mia, now 13; Leo, 11; Colin, nine; and Laurent, seven.

Armed with a bucket list that included swimming with dolphins and seeing elephants, they travelled to places such as China, Cambodia, South Korea, Egypt, Nepal, Zimbabwe and Ecuador.

The goal was for Mia, Colin and Laurent – who all have retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that progressively shrinks one’s visual field – to see the world’s beauty while they still could and create visual memories they can draw on later.

The family’s inspiring tale of love and resilience – which is full of ups and downs as the children come to grips with their condition – is told in Blink, a documentary that is now showing on Disney+.

Speaking at a screening in New York earlier in 2024, Mr Pelletier, who works in finance, says the film captures the attitude he and his wife try to impart to their children.

“The way we look at the situation, and how we’re trying to portray it to the kids, is that it’s not a life-threatening disease.

“It’s going to bring a lot of challenges, but their life is not going to be less meaningful or less beautiful.

“So it’s not a sad story – it’s just a story that has challenges. If you look at it with a positive eye, there’s something to look forward to afterwards,” he says.

Edmund Stenson, a British film-maker who co-directed the documentary with Canadian film-maker Daniel Roher, says they set out to capture both the beauty of the planet and how it is seen by a child.

“We knew we could do justice to the natural world, but what Daniel and I were excited about was a chance to find a child’s-eye view at moments in the film. 

“And balancing that with the core emotional journey of the parents,” adds Stenson, who previously collaborated with Roher on Navalny (2022), a film about the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny that won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar.

The pair also wanted to make a movie that was more than just a travelogue, and that captured both big and small moments in the family’s lives.

“So when Laurent goes on his first day of school, you get this rich and unique opportunity to be with a child in one of those tiny, everyday moments that we’ve all felt and that stand in for a lot about our lives,” Stenson says.

The Pelletiers attracted a lot of media attention in North America as they chronicled their journey on social media, and were approached by several production companies about making a film.

But when they agreed to do this documentary – which meant a three-man film crew joining them midway through the trip – they did not think many people would ever see it.

“In our mind, nobody really goes to see documentaries, and the only thing we thought was it was going to make for a nice souvenir for the kids,” says Ms Lemay, who works in business intelligence.

“We didn’t think further than that – and we never expected it to get so big along the way,” she adds of the film, which received warm reviews when it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in August.

She is also glad the film accurately depicts her family – and that audiences have found it uplifting.

“It was never our movie and I didn’t have any message, but I was really glad at how it turned out because that’s who we really are, and I was hoping it would reflect that.”