Depicting blindness in 'All the Light We Cannot See' 'changed me,' director says
Last week marked the arrival of Netflix's "All the Light We Cannot See," a four-part adaptation of Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
Directed by Shawn Levy, the series follows Marie-Laure (played as a child by Nell Sutton and as a teenager by Aria Mia Loberti), a blind French girl who flees occupied Paris with her father, Daniel LeBlanc (Mark Ruffalo), to live with her uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie) in the coastal town of Saint-Malo. In between a constant barrage of American bombs, she conducts illegal radio broadcasts that entrance Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann), a young Nazi soldier tasked with tracking down exactly these kinds of illicit transmissions.
Although Hollywood has a long history of casting sighted actors to play blind characters — Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman" and Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" are just a couple among countless examples — "All the Light We Cannot See" is a breakthrough in representation for blind and low-vision performers. Both actors who play Marie-Laure are legally blind, making it the first project of this scope to cast such performers in leading roles as blind characters.
Key to creating an authentic depiction of blindness was Joe Strechay, an associate producer and a blindness and accessibility consultant who worked closely with Levy throughout production in France and Hungary. Strechay, who became legally blind at 19 and says he is now totally blind, is a film and
