Film: Dancing at the Vatican
Watch out for a heart-warming film about an extraordinary journey of a group of Latin Americans suffering from the little-understood and hidden Huntington’s Disease.
It will have you reaching for your tissues as you discover how this cruel, incurable and inherited illness destroys lives, progressively impacting nerve cells.
It will also inspire hope against hope that such a distressing disease affecting nearly a million people globally could be treated by gene therapy thanks to pioneering research. At present a parent with HD has a 50/50 chance of passing it to their children and families face discrimination, rejection and condemnation.
Thanks to the tireless campaigning of Charles Sabine, the Emmy award-winning former NBC-TV foreign correspondent and himself from an HD family, his film brings the disease out of the shadows.
He teamed up with charity workers and researchers to bring HD sufferers from Latin America – where the incidence is sometimes 1,000 times higher than elsewhere – for an audience with Pope Francis.
None of them had ever travelled abroad or boarded a train or plane before. Their disabilities made long-distance travel a huge challenge. Many felt stigma and shame, seen as being cursed or punished by God as they lost power of speech and movement.
Against the odds 1700 patients, doctors, carers, scientists, family and friends converged on the Vatican. They were embraced by the Pontiff.
And they danced…despite the fury of the Swiss Guards. Nothing would curb the excitement and enthusiasm of the Vatican visitors.
‘All these people were so happy and animated. We did it. We danced at the Vatican,’ a delighted Sabine told the audience of the premiere of Dancing at the Vatican, hosted by BAFTA Piccadilly on February 5.
The audience, with guests including chef Raymond Blanc, singer Sylvie Lewis, Earl Charles Spencer, scientists and HD sufferers, heard how research by UCL’s Huntington’s Centre and drug company Roche had notched up its first success in reducing a protein to help prevent or slow down HD.
‘It’s tantalising, within our reach. We will not stop until we succeed. We have not yet defeated the enemy but this is an enemy that can be defeated,’ they were told.
Sabine, whose father is a sufferer, added: ‘Someone in my position is no longer hopeless, like my father. We have turned this corner from a relentless decline. There is a possibility of something different. That means everything.
‘The last time I saw my father alone I told him: “We are fixing this.”
- Dancing at the Vatican will be screened globally and then available to download. Www.dancingatthevatican.com
