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from Mark Wojahn:
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Unknown White Male:
From the filmmaker:
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Sometime between 8pm on July 1st and 7am on July 2nd, 2002, Doug Bruce lost himself. That morning, riding alone on a New York subway headed towards Coney Island, he could not remember his name. Where he worked. Who his friends were. How much money he had in his bank account. He was without his identity.
UNKNOWN WHITE MALE is the true story of how Bruce, a young, handsome, successful former stockbroker, struggles to learn who he was and who he will become. The documentary, directed and produced by Bruce’s longtime friend, Rupert Murray, chronicles this profound journey. Two MRIs, two CAT scans, 26 blood tests and an army of psychiatrists cannot properly diagnose what turns out to be the rarest and most startling form of memory loss: retrograde amnesia. Was Bruce the victim of a robbery resulting in a slight head injury or the effects of a small cyst on his pituitary gland? Or was Bruce subconsciously reacting to the death of his mother a few years before? It is a testament to Murray’s smooth but honest narrative that the film asks all the right questions even if many of the answers remain elusive. Murray empathetically walks us through Bruce’s quest. He assembles dozens of childhood photos, decades of home video, extensive interviews with family members, friends, ex-girlfriends, psychiatrists, neurologists, and philosophers – and the touching participation of Bruce himself. Murray shows us how Bruce transformed overnight from what friends describe as man shaped by the abrasive trading rooms of the London and Paris stock exchanges into a reflective, emotional, articulate photography student. We watch how he reconstructs a life for himself by retaining what he admires about his former self while casting off what – and whom – he dislikes. It is at once a nightmare and a dream come true: a chance at rebirth. We watch Bruce, now 35, as he plays catch up with popular culture and current events and experiences the serenity of a snowfall and the bombast of fireworks. We watch him reconstruct relationships with family members he does not recognize and fall in love with a woman who knows only the post-accident version of her lover. Paraphrasing John Locke, one of the film’s interviewees, Bruce is certainly the same man but questionably the same person. UNKNOWN WHITE MALE is part objective documentary, part intimate autobiography. But most of all, it is the rawest form of reality TV. From the filmmaker: Official website | Trailer | Buy the DVD | Hosting materials Tags: documentary, memory loss, identity, psychology, nature vs nurture No screenings of Unknown White Male are currently scheduled. Host one yourself!
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