Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien

What you see in this article is really who he was. A deep thinker, he's the reason I started writing at a young age. He never gave up. He passed three years after his film won an academy award. I'm not a big fan of the sessions but the actor nailed his body and movements.

This is an absolute exceptional film taking you into the mind, life, struggle, joy, depression, love, and eventual (beyond the film) death of a completely developed person but physically fully incapacitated.

Think of where most of us may find ourselves in the coming 30 to 50 years and you may see yourself in Brian's place though he was strickened so much earlier in life.

Thank Jessica for doing a superb performance in documenting this person's life. Will never forget her remarks at the Academy Awards where she so humbly remarked (and I paraphrase) that it was indeed a gala where the dress you were wearing to it cost more than what it cost to make the film.

And thank you Brian!

I can't agree more with the comments made by an earlier viewer of this film. Mark O'Brien's life was lived to the fullest with more courage, guts and compassion than many of us "able bodied" persons. His witty observations serve in their own way as a trenchant critique of a society obsessed with physical beauty and athletic prowess. This is a man whose sexuality, dreams and demons forged a unique and unforgettable life. I came away from the film both humbled by my own pretensions yet exalted by Mark's refusal to give up. (He was an unbending opponent of assisted suicide.) Look for it at your public library. I challenge you to watch this film and not come away a changed person.

I can't express how phenomenal a film this is. Partly it is Jessica Yu's superb, understated direction. But a large part is Mark O'Brien himself, whose abiding intelligence and evocative poetry are electrifyingly cinematic, despite his being confined to an iron lung. I saw this film almost a year before it won the Oscar, and I have rarely been as happy as I was then. When I heard he died several years later, I was genuinely saddened. I watched it again today, when it was announced that Christopher Reeve had died. It reminds you how truly special some people are -- sometimes not because of what they do, but simply who they are. Which, when you think about it, may be the same thing. Don't miss it.

I had never heard of Mark O'Brien when Jessica Yu's "Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien" won Best Documentary Short Subject at the Academy Awards. But the documentary shows not only what O'Brien went through, but how he wanted to be known to the world. Basically, he wanted to be known not as a cripple, but as a human. Despite spending most of his life in an iron lung, the polio-afflicted O'Brien managed to be a journalist and poet until his death in 1999.

Progress with polio has gotten made since the documentary's release. In 2014, only Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan saw cases of the disease, and in 2015 Nigeria had stopped the spread. It sounds like a terrible disease. In the end, Mark O'Brien deserves a lot of credit for what he accomplished, and Jessica Yu deserves credit for bringing his story to the world. I understand that her most recent movie was about water crises.

I recommend the documentary.