Little Man is the latest film offering by director/producer Nicole Conn, the filmmaker responsible for the 1991 groundbreaking and critically acclaimed lesbian-themed movie Claire of the Moon. This time around, Conn films both herself and her family in a kind of “real life” format for this feature-length documentary about her premature son's struggle to survive.

When the story begins, Nicole and her life-partner, political activist Gwen Baba (7 years into their relationship), share a lovely home in suburban Los Angeles along with their two-year-old daughter Gabrielle. As the film’s press release says, they “have it all,” and are “on top of the world.”

Then Nicole, somewhat obsessively, decides that she wants to have another child. Unable to conceive, she contractually hires a surrogate mother who becomes pregnant with what will be Nicole’s legal son, Nicolas.

But there are problems during the pregnancy, and the infant is born severely prematurely. Born 100 days too early and weighing only one pound, tiny Nicolas is the smallest surviving white male patient ever born at Cedar’s Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

At birth the frighteningly unready newborn appears more fetus than baby. During his first year or so of life the tiny, weak Nicolas remains connected via every possible body orifice and then some to all manner of ghoulish life-support devices. He undergoes an endless stream of health setbacks, complications and life-threatening emergency crises, requiring medical procedure after medical procedure.

Little Man documents Nicole’s efforts to capture all the above on film. Camera crew in tow, she is very determined and often at odds with the staff and the privacy rules at the Neonatology Intensive Care Unit throughout Nicolas’s interminable 158 days there. As we learn from numerous interviews with hospital personnel, Nicole sort of drives everyone nuts.

According to the press release, little man “is the story of how a micro-preemie brought a family to its knees. As Nicolas struggles for life, Conn and Baba struggle to keep their family from disintegrating under the unrelenting stress and chaos of hospitals, emergency medical crises and a crushing blow to trust.”

As one might expect, the filming of pathetic little Nicolas’s struggle to live cannot help but pull on one’s heartstrings. The Madonna-like shots of Nicole holding the helpless, almost E.T.-looking Nicolas close to her breast are very powerful. This movie is not for the faint of heart. Squeamish viewers would be wise to heed the up front warning about its graphic medical scenes.

Page 1 / 2 - Next