The Sessions
A man confined to an iron lung by polio hires a professional sex surrogate, with the counsel of his priest, to experience physical intimacy for the first time.
Sundance Audience Award 2012 won
Mark O'Brien, a poet paralysed by polio and dependent on an iron lung, decides in his late thirties that he wants to experience sex. With the encouragement of his priest, he engages Cheryl, a professional sex surrogate, and their sessions become a careful, bounded course in physical intimacy.
The film stages desire, shame and the body as an explicitly therapeutic encounter, showing how touch and trust are approached in structured steps and how disability and longing meet. It offers a therapist a frank portrait of intimacy pursued within professional limits. It won the Audience Award at Sundance in 2012, and is drawn from the essay On Seeing a Sex Surrogate by Mark O'Brien.
Details
- 2012
- United States
- English
- Film