A sort of Patch Adams, Angus tries his best to entertain the children and make them laugh. RIGHT: A still from the film.
By Anand Holla
The opening shot of The Kid and the Clown features Angus the clown and six-year-old Tobias smiling and peering into the opposite ends of a tiny handheld glass ball.
To these visuals, Angus’ voiceover says, “You can’t get well without humour. When a human is positive and happy, the body accepts treatment more readily. I have no proof of it. But everyone who has witnessed it, believes it.”
Ida Gron’s heart-warming 53-minute Danish documentary is as much an ode to the indomitable power of hope as it is to compassion, friendship and humour. The Doha Film Institute hosted free screenings of the film over the weekend to a warm response.
Set in Sekjby Sygehus, one of Denmark’s largest academic hospitals, the film follows Angus, who works in the children’s oncology department and is never seen without his clown attire, and Tobias, who is battling cancer and the aggressive medical procedures it demands.
A sort of Patch Adams, Angus tries his best to entertain the children and make them laugh. Call it his placebo for little souls mired in a web of endless injections and chemo treatments. The film’s focus though is on Tobias and Angus, and how their bonhomie somehow seems to lessen the former’s suffering. As Angus, who visited Tobias twice a week through those one and a half years, puts it, “I can’t take away their pain, but I can help change the situation.”
From playing Guitar Hero to blowing soap bubbles, the duo does anything that could couch the harshness of reality. Angus even lets Tobias stick Band-Aids on his hairy leg, and then peel them off; just to distract him from the pain of the injection he just took. Each time he sees Angus walk in to his room, Tobias’ face lights up. Once, he even takes the trouble to try and place Angus a call when he can’t find him around.
With time, they become such thick pals that Tobias feels free to pull Angus’ red clown nose off, and Angus doesn’t hesitate to make light of Tobias’ condition if only to break the tension. “Goodness, what a lot of tubes! It looks like you have exhaust pipes coming out of your head. You are a dragster,” Angus tells Tobias.
Despite the despondence, Tobias’ discerning eyes tell us that he perhaps can make sense of the mayhem around him, and also inside him. As for Angus, the hurt that he silently and routinely soaks like a sponge is apparent in his voice and eyes, too. “I have said goodbye to a great number of kids,” he says haplessly.
Known as one of Denmark’s most skilled hospital clowns, Angus has been working since 2001 in such grim sites. Putting a smile on the ailing kids’ faces clearly isn’t easy on him. He admits that he can’t afford to worry or wonder “what if,” because that would prevent him from doing his work. He is aware that for children like Tobias, it’s “about being all alone and having someone to be alone with.”
That’s perhaps why he is always game to indulge Tobias and other children with his goofy antics like tricycling alongside their mobile beds through the hospital hallway or just acting clumsy. At one point, he turns Tobias into “a bandit” as he makes Tobias wear a hospital mouth mask and brandish a gun-shaped balloon at nurses and doctors in the hospital corridor.
As Tobias’ condition improves, he looks sharper. The final results of his MIBG scan and bone marrow reports place him in the clear – the cancer is weeded out.
Shot entirely indoors in the hospital to underline the claustrophobia, the film celebrates the therapeutic value of a good laugh by showing Angus as a breath of much-needed fresh air. At the eighth Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival, it won the best film in the Child and Family Award in the medium length category offered by Al Jazeera Children Channel.
In his note on the film, Gron had said, “When I first heard of the existence of ‘hospital clowns,’ I was deeply touched. It seemed truly meaningful to ‘infect’ children with joy, warmth and humour during their hospital stay – a time where they are cut off from any semblance of a normal childhood.” In fact, when Gron’s mother came down with cancer, laughter helped him, too.
