Second Assistant Director
There’s a sense that time is running out. Our narrator, Simon, is like a man sinking in quicksand. He’s a man of routine. Rising, dressing, travelling to work on the DLR. Every day is the same. His sense of self is slipping away as he becomes (perhaps literally) someone else. It’s a similar story for Dr Benham, stuck in his STD clinic watching a parade of patients come and go. In his parallel story of metamorphosis he’s being spat out by his own life. He too is becoming a different person, from the feet up.
Third Assistant Director
Ludwig Guttmann, a renowned German neurosurgeon who fled Nazi Germany in the early days of WWII, takes a position at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, England in 1944 and begins to transform the lives of his patients, paralyzed soldiers that have been written-off and who are facing death from neglect. A breakthrough comes when Dr. Guttmann introduces sport into their rehabilitation, a breakthrough that leads to the founding of the Paralympic Games.
