At the beginning of this documentary, Cecile, a 10-year-old Danish girl, cannot finish her Karate class. She feels weak and misses the company of her mother Stine, who does not take long to come. They both are fighting together against an internal enemy: Cecile's leukemia.
In A Normal Life, a documentary available on Guidedoc, mother and daughter and the whole family prepare for Cecile's last chance to continue living: a bone marrow transplant.
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From the age of 2, the life of Cecile and her family, including her two sisters and father, have been used to long stays in hospitals to treat the Cecile’s leukemia diagnosed at that age. But after several sessions of chemotherapy, the disease shows no signs of remission, so the bone marrow of a German donor arrives as Cecile’s extraordinary opportunity to continue living.
The camera of the directors Mikala Krogh and Sigrid Dyekjær finds sufficient invisibility within the home environment and the spaces of the hospital to document the great challenge that the small Cecile faces. From the long hours in a hospital room, the moments after the transplant and the tense days of recovery, we as spectators live next to a family that struggles to stay together.
Watch A Normal Life now on Guidedoc
It is precisely those apparently insignificant or unimportant moments that reach an immeasurable value in this film, those familiar and everyday interstices that inevitably make us feel alive, because, otherwise, we would not be witnessing them. This documentary invites us to discover the beauty in the most difficult moments of life, no matter that death may be hovering near us.
But the film also shows us tough scenes, those instants of weakness of a girl and a mother who try to overcome an invisible force that threatens to separate them. Several times they return to the hospital and several injections and medicines are given. But in the end, only that powerful filial love is the one that ends up overcoming the shadows. Cecile can have a new life after the transplant. Like her beautiful hair, her hope continues to grow to obtain more than a normal life.
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