LEAVING THE NEST
Aksel Stasny | USA, Austria 2016 | 51 Min. | OmeU
Tom and Elizabeth live in a quaint suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, with two children and another on the way. Early on they notice a developmental delay in two of their sons, Mark and Tim. Medical investigations didn’t lead to any successful treatments and soon they were both diagnosed as physically and mentally disabled, limited to walkers and wheelchairs for the rest of their lives. Tom and Elizabeth lost faith in finding a cure and suffered together through depression.
At the age of fifty, Tom started to break through the fog of depression and religious oppression, only to discover his homosexuality. Tom left Jacksonville and moved to New York City, while trying to deal with the remorse of having left his family. Elizabeth enlisted Mark and Tim in state-funded group-home projects, but faces huge setbacks in cuts of government funds and the overall financial troubles in the State of Florida.
Despite all their obstacles in life, Tom and Elizabeth reunited as friends and were able to achieve the more or less impossible: They manage to accumulate enough funding for Mark and Tim to eventually move into a permanent group home housing facility.
