Friday, October 03, 2008

Freeheld


I have been delaying watching this multiple award winner documentary, including wining the 2008 Oscar, as really touches home in many ways. But I knew that I had to watch this compelling story about the courage to do the right thing when you have a proven record of doing the right thing during your whole life.

I know that some countries in the world, including America, have been slowly realizing that same-sex couples should have equal rights and opportunities to society legal benefits that most heterosexual couples take for granted. Then I also know that most countries and most autonomous places in America still deny the right. This documentary tells about a case where a lesbian couple decided not to use, as one man says, “devious” methods and requested a New Jersey county Freeholders to grant to the living partner her police pension after her death. By doing so, provoked reaction in other counties to finally generate state legislation that allows same-sex couples to have same rights as heterosexual couples.

The documentary is compelling, has great tech specs and touches the story without going into any kind of dramatics, just recording touching passages of the couple’s lifestyle and struggle to overcome what it is inevitable.

Not all of us live where you can have some rights and in my own skin I know what is not to have the right to decide what to do next with your life-partner when you’re in a hospital and there is need to take an urgent decision and you are not allowed to take it as you’re not family. Most of you probably have no idea what’s like, and honestly I do not desire to any of you to have “an idea”. Even when this documental does not touches this issue, absolutely makes you think about many other situations that still prevail in most of the world.

But what really this documentary does is to make you think that ‘silence’ kills and allows preservation of whatever is the establishment. Having the courage to speak makes the difference, even when it takes many years to accomplish something positive.

Definitively a must be seen documentary that I strongly recommend and I honestly thank Lieutenant Laurel Hester and her partner Stacie for sharing their story with the world, as well as filmmaker Cynthia Wade for facilitating them to do so and for doing it in such an outstanding way.

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