The Eighth Day (Le huitième jour), 1996, Belgium, directed by J. Vari Dormelì. George is a boy with Down syndrome who has packed his world into a suitcase and set out in search of his dreams. Harry is a burnt-out manager who teaches ambitious climbers how to be unstoppable—until he discovers, painfully, how easily one can lose everything, starting with family love. Two adrift human beings who, each in their own way, end up crossing paths.
Watch this film for the remarkable performances of its two leads, and because it shines light on the lives of disabled people after their parents are gone.
I have watched The Eighth Day three times, and each time the emotion has been overwhelming.
When the film won the prize at Cannes, I was pleasantly surprised. It seemed important to me that a person with a disability be recognized as equally professional as any "normal" person. I worried the film might be maudlin, designed to inspire pity and sympathy. But George emerges as a deeply positive character—one who understands pain and teaches that love for everything around us is what matters most.
The director may have pushed his two roles toward extremes: good on one side, evil on the other. Perhaps life is not so stark. Yet anyone who has lived with young people with Down syndrome will recognize in George much of who they are. Not only their gentleness and affection, but also their stubborn determination to hold fast to their own ideas, their desire to retreat into a magical world entirely their own, and their will to live the reality around them without allowing anyone to sweep them into a rhythm of life that doesn't belong to them.
Henry, the other protagonist, represents the world we inhabit—but more than that, the *way* we inhabit it. A good job isn't enough; we want a career. A house isn't enough; we want a villa with a pool. So we run and stop for nothing, sacrificing the best parts of ourselves.
The two become great friends. Perhaps it is George who teaches Henry something. There is a scene where the boy forces his friend to lie down for a minute on the grass and look at the sky. "One minute, all ours," George says.
That's it. We need to understand that "one minute, all ours" would teach us to pay attention to the people beside us—people we so often forget in the rush of our frenzied lives. The director balanced deeply dramatic moments with ironic, joyful ones. The film moves us and entertains us in unexpected ways.
The film was shown in many schools across Rome. That was tremendously valuable. In just a few months, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of young people learned things no school or organization could have taught them as effectively.
I attended one of these screenings as a representative of the Italian Association of People with Down Syndrome. The cinema in Trastevere was packed with roughly three hundred students from secondary schools—teenagers between fifteen and nineteen. I was deeply moved and anxious. How would they behave? I feared laughter, scoffs, yawns, sarcastic remarks. But in my heart, I hoped and believed it would be different. And it was. During the film, absolute silence—broken only by laughter at the scenes and by requests for tissues among girls who couldn't hold back their tears. At the end, warm applause. The students stood; they knew there would be a discussion afterward, but nothing would have forced them to stay. When I took the microphone and introduced myself as the mother of a thirteen-year-old boy with Down syndrome, my voice trembled. I feared touching on their indifference toward someone less fortunate than themselves. Immediately, they sat back down. They stayed to listen to me speak about my experience and about the Association's work for nearly an hour without moving. And believe me, they stayed because they *wanted* to know more about these young people who are often in their own classrooms and who remain, unfortunately, strangers to them—not because they were forced to.
I explained that, fortunately, very few young people with Down syndrome in our country are placed in institutions. The vast majority remain with their families, attend public schools, play sports, and live lives full of social relationships. This matters because understanding the reality prevents the unpleasant reactions that ignorance breeds.
Our young people can do much. We all must help them become full citizens. Love, respect, tolerance—these are universal values. If we can live them out, we will surely create a better world where our young people will be, like George, true protagonists of their own lives.
— Rosalba Bolognesi, 1997