When Michael Pearce, MFA, an assistant professor in the department of mass communication created a film about the survivors of stroke, his biggest challenge was getting people to open up to him.
“They are talking about one of the hardest things in their lives,” Pearce said. “I had to get them to the point of where they felt comfortable talking to us and inviting us into their homes.”
His 30-minute film is titled “RHD: Hidden Diagnosis.” RHD stands for right hemisphere (brain) damage. It follows a group of stroke survivors who interact with speech-language pathology students at North Carolina Central University (NCCU).
The entire film was shot and edited by Pearce and takes place during the worst of the Covid pandemic. Some of the initial scenes are of video counseling sessions between students-clinicians and survivors.
“I had a plan to shoot around the time Covid blew up,” Pearce said. “It was on pause for about a year and a half.”
The idea originated with Jamila Minga, Ph.D., who then worked in the NCCU School of Education. She is now an assistant professor and speech-language pathologist at Duke University.
The idea caught Pearce’s attention.
“I have a fair number of stroke survivors in my family,” he said.
Minga coordinated with patients and led the sessions. “And I had a really great mix of (stroke survivors) in terms of where they were,” Pearce said. “They made a point of not saying ‘recovery’ but finding what their new normal is.”
He did the work on the film for free, although a grant from the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities paid for a laptop computer that he used to edit around 100 hours of footage down to a half hour.
Pearce has been involved in filmmaking all his adult life. At NCCU, he teaches video editing, screenwriting and film production. This is his third documentary of 30 minutes since starting at NCCU in 2018.
“RHD: Hidden Diagnosis” has since been shown at several film festivals and also at the American Speech Language Hearing Association Conference and at the National Black Association for Speech Language and Hearing.
It may be viewed on the PBS website at https://www.pbs.org/show/rhd-hidden-diagnosis/
