May 4, 2006

From left: Lela Reichert-Klein, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar. “A Lion in the House,” by Bognar and Reichert, will have its Yellow Springs premiere Sunday, May 7, at the Little Art Theatre.

By Diane Chiddister

The families spotlighted in the documentary A Lion in the House, by Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert, are not mystics or superheroes. They are ordinary people, and yet they are quietly heroic.

They are moms and dads whose worst dream came true — their child has cancer — and still they wake each day to put one foot in front of the other and do what needs to be done.

They are ordinary people who meet an extraordinary challenge with courage and grace.

In A Lion in the House, the filmmakers were “trying to illuminate the human condition,” Reichert said last week. “What is it to be human? What are we made of?”

The film supplies an answer, she said. While some people who hear of the documentary’s subject tell her that they could not rise to the challenge if their child had cancer, Reichert believes differently.

“They could,” she said. “We’re all stronger than we think we are.”

Lion will have its Yellow Springs premiere this Sunday, May 7, at the Little Art Theatre. The four-hour film begins at 2 p.m., followed by a reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Winds. The film will also be shown at the Neon Movies in Dayton at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, May 9, and Wednesday, May 10. The filmmakers and families in the film will attend each screening and speak afterwards.

Since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the film has garnered a multitude of awards. Last month Lion shared the Best Documentary prize at the Nashville Film Festival and won a Special Jury Citation at the Full Frame Festival in Chapel Hill, N.C. In March, it won a Special Jury Prize at the Cleveland Film Festival.

It has also been selected to be shown at coming film festivals in Philadelphia, London, New Zealand and Prague, and it airs on PBS on June 21 and 22.

Along with prizes, Lion has received rave reviews from such papers as The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, whose critic, Clint O’Connor, called it “an astounding accomplishment.” Ty Burr of The Boston Globe described Lion as “epic,” and Jan Stuart of Newsday described the film as “a powerhouse documentary which transfixes viewers for every second of its four-hour length.”

Reichert and Bognar, both previously award-winning documentarians, are thrilled with the film’s success. But in the three months since its premiere at Sundance, they said, they have also been troubled by something they hear more frequently than they expected.

A four-hour film about children with cancer is just too depressing, some people say. And while these people say they admire Bognar and Reichert for having made the film, they also say that they couldn’t possibly sit through it.

To this comment, Bognar replies, “give it a half hour,” and see what happens.

Bognar and Reichert believe that they know what will happen. People who begin watching Lion don’t stop, the filmmakers said. Nor do they walk away during the film’s intermission. Rather, the filmmakers said, viewers later tell Reichert and Bognar that the film was nothing like what they expected.

“We hear people say it’s a life-changing experience,” Bognar said.

One woman who saw the film, Bognar said, told him she wished she could see it “every three months to remind her how to be a good human being.”

Lion is “surprisingly uplifting,” Reichert said. “We take you to a deep and dark place but then we bring you back out again,” she said.

A Lion in the House follows over a six-year period five Cincinnati-area families whose children were diagnosed with cancer. The film actually took eight years to make, during which Reichert and Bognar filmed the families both at their homes and at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital as the children received chemotherapy, got better, had remissions, received more treatment and perhaps got better again. They filmed the kids at play and in bed, at birthday parties, family reunions, on Christmas Day and on New Year’s Eve (for three years in a row). At the end of the six years, some of the children were still alive, and some were not, but all the families survived.

Reviewers have praised the film’s intimacy with its subjects, and the filmmakers cite several reasons for the closeness they achieved with the families. First, according to Bognar, new technology allowed the couple to film with hand-held lightweight digital cameras, so that their presence was not obtrusive. And over time, Bognar and Reichert said, the families realized that the filmmakers were committed to them, that they would drop everything to come to Cincinnati to film if the occasion called for it.

“We just kept coming,” Reichert said. “We told them, ‘we want to stick with you.’ ”

Perhaps most of all, Reichert said, the families trusted the couple because they had also been through the experience of having a child with cancer.

Reichert’s daughter, Lela Reichert-Klein, was 18 and had completed her treatment for Hodgkin’s disease when they received a call from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital pediatric oncologist who asked them to make the film. They initially struggled with the request, not sure they wanted to re-enter the world of cancer that they had just left behind.

Ultimately, they decided that they needed to make the film, to try to illuminate that world.

“I was a member of their community, I had walked the same road,” Reichert said of her connection with the families. “I wasn’t a stranger looking in.”

And in an ironic twist of fate, Reichert became even more immersed in the cancer community in January, when she was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Reichert received the diagnosis when she landed in Utah to attend the Sundance festival, and she and Bognar left the festival early to begin her treatment at the James Cancer Center in Columbus. Since then, she has endured four rounds of grueling four-day-long chemotherapy.

“I used to think that I knew what it was like to have cancer, but I didn’t have a clue,” she said. “Now I feel like I know what it’s like. It sucks.”

Reichert’s cancer diagnosis prompted Lela, who now lives in Chicago, to return to Yellow Springs to help care for her mother. As a cancer survivor, Lela said she knows what needs to be done, and she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Last week the family received the best possible news. Tests revealed that, after the fourth round of chemo, Reichert has no more cancer cells in her body. To be safe, she needs to go through two more chemo rounds (one of which will end right before the film’s screening in Yellow Springs) and then radiation.

While Bognar and Reichert are thrilled with her progress, they said they have missed what they looked forward to during their eight years of filming: to experience audiences’ response to Lion. While Reichert was able to attend the North Carolina festival, she has missed most screenings while either going through, or recovering from, chemotherapy.

So the couple said they are especially excited about their Yellow Springs premiere. The Yellow Springs community has served a major role in the making of Lion, Bognar said. Some villagers directly contributed to the filmmaking, such as Karen Durgans, who served as associate producer, and Jim Klein, who helped with editing. And a multitude of villagers volunteered to attend numerous screenings, which were critical to the filmmakers’ achieving their vision.

“That process was crucial,” Bognar said of the screenings. “After years of editing your eyes are not clear and you need the jolt of fresh sensibilities. We would be sunk without the support from this town.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com