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Stay With Me focuses on making individual documentaries of families who have a relative with brain injury. The experience that families and individuals go through can be very overwhelming at first. Usually looking at life and planning for it can be a difficult and depressing task. Families worldwife for who brain injury is a daily struggle go through life with great courage, tenacity and very unique ways of looking at the lives they lead.
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The focus on the families comes from the fact that regardless of how severe the brain injury of the patient, in the end, it is the families who shape their daily lives within their means. They are the most affected psychologically, socially and sentimentally. No person who loves another lets go easily, and no one wants to feel a burden to others. Stay With Me looks at family life in a neutral way asking those documented to share what they have learnt through their lives.
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In the US alone there are between 1.5 and 2 million of people with cerebral palsy, non-traumatic brain damage. Traumatic brain injuries can happen to 185-200 per 100,000 people annually in the US alone and in the UK it is estimated that happens to 430 per 100,000 people. The burden is considerable and could be one of the most expensive medical issues in long term care for any individual or any national health care system. The numbers above do not include the average of 2 births in 1,000 born with cerebral palsy in the developed world.
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This is the first piece of work I made on brain injury, in South Africa, documenting three families' daily life; The Ferreiras, The Adams and the Rabotapis.
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Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, August, 2008. Anna Rabotapi in bed and her portrait on top of Maria's chest of drawers in her bedroom. Maria sleeps with Anna every night.