Summary

A drama based on the director's experience of coming to terms with multiple sclerosis. 'A Prayer Before Birth' chronicles, with disturbing intensity, the physical and emotional traumas of a young woman's journey from able-bodied exuberance to the acceptance of disability. Rejecting the objective worthiness often associated with such subject matter, the filmmaker opts instead for an escalating sequence of symbolic and impressionistic images to convey the increasing sense of unreality as the disease inexorably enters her daily life. Confronts debilitating illness with creative vitality, simultaneously desperate and defiant.