{"id":244361,"date":"2021-05-10T07:36:34","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T12:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=244361"},"modified":"2021-05-07T18:01:32","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T23:01:32","slug":"animated-music-video-down-syndrome-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/animated-music-video-down-syndrome-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Tear-jerker: Animated music video shows man with Down syndrome’s ‘life well lived’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Disability advocacy group L’Arche Canada has teamed up with Jordan Hart to create the first ever animated music video to feature someone with Down syndrome as the protagonist.<\/p>\n

“Freedom” follows the life of a man with Down syndrome, starting as he’s an adult taking care of his elderly mother. It then flashes back through his life, starting when his mother was pregnant and found out he would have Down syndrome. His mother was told to put him in an institution and his father abandoned them, but his mother never stopped loving and caring for him.<\/p>\n

Together, they tackle the hardships that come with childhood and life as well as the good things. When the young man with Down syndrome graduates from high school, the entire auditorium erupts into applause, with his father finally present. He goes on, with his mother’s support, to propose to his childhood sweetheart and get married, where his father writes his mother a note on a wedding napkin: “You were right. He’s perfect.”<\/p>\n

At the end of the video, several people with Down syndrome who have achieved remarkable things are spotlighted, like Claude Kitogo, a Kenyan pastry chef, and Linda Slinger, a Canadian woman who survived being institutionalized. But most touchingly, it highlights a French man named Christophe Pierrecourt. “Never learned to speak, accomplished nothing fancy,” the text reads. “But… a life well-lived.”<\/p>\n