This week, Galway audiences have a rare opportunity to encounter a film that has already touched hearts across the country. Born That Way, the profoundly moving new documentary by awardwinning Corrandulla-based filmmaker Éamon Little, will receive two special hometown screenings at Nun’s Island Theatre — 8pm on Sunday, December 7, and 8pm on Wednesday, December 10. For those who cherish intimate, human-centred storytelling, these screenings promise an experience as reflective as it is transformative.
At its centre stands Patrick Lydon, a gentle, lucid presence whose life arcs from Massachusetts to rural Ireland, and from the newsroom of the New York Times to the craft of community-building.
What begins as the portrait of a charismatic man with a penchant for Dostoevsky and an instinct for connection soon becomes a moving testament to how one life, lived with conviction, can shape a society from its margins. In the early 1970s, alongside his wife Gladys, Lydon settled in Ballytobin, Co. Kilkenny, where the pair helped establish Ireland’s first Camphill Community — a radically inclusive environment in which people with and without intellectual disabilities lived, worked, and grew together with dignity. Sixteen further communities would follow, the echoes of those early choices rippling outward for decades.
Little’s documentary, though grounded in biography, is anything but conventional. Shot over the final year of Lydon’s life, after his diagnosis with motor neuron disease, Born That Way weaves intimate contemporary footage with rich, often lyrical archival material. Scenes shift between Lydon’s recollections of academic life in Exeter and Yale, his near-draft to Vietnam, his encounters with rock journalism, and his eventual migration to Ireland — all told with an unforced ease that belies the extraordinary nature of his journey.
But the film also pauses, with quiet insistence, over the deeper questions that animated his life: the rights of people with disabilities, the tension between medical systems and lived humanity, and the belief that “their issues are not health issues; they are who they are.”
What makes the film so affecting, however, is not only Lydon’s story, but the sensitivity with which Little tells it. Having first encountered Camphill decades earlier, and having filmed intermittently within its communities since 2008, Little approaches his subject with a rare blend of trust, familiarity, and artistic distance. The result is a film that neither sentimentalises nor sanitises.
Instead, it allows audiences to sit with the complexities and contradictions of communal life, the beauty of radical inclusion, and the quiet heroism of those who carry it forward. The presence of Gladys Lydon — perceptive, steady, and tender — deepens the portrait further, offering a vantage point both companionate and grounding.
For Galway audiences, these screenings feel like more than routine cinema listings. They mark the homecoming of a film shaped here, by a filmmaker whose ties to his subject run deep, about a man whose legacy continues to influence lives throughout Ireland. As the lights dim in Nun’s Island Theatre, viewers will find themselves invited not only to witness a life, but to reflect on how we live with one another — and what kind of community we wish to build. https://www.bornthatwayfilm.com/.
