Awakenings

In a Bronx hospital in 1969, a research physician discovers that patients who have spent decades in a catatonic state respond to a new drug, and one of them, Leonard, wakes into an adult world he never knew as a boy. The film follows their shared elation as the ward comes alive, and the grief as the effect proves unstable and the stillness returns.

The film is a study of identity interrupted and recovered, of loss lived twice, and of a withdrawn doctor who is himself awakened to feeling through his patients. It offers a clinician a picture of the doctor and patient changed together by the encounter. It was an Academy Award Best Picture nominee in 1991 and draws on the book Awakenings by Oliver Sacks.