Word: sampedro
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...think you gonna capture thirty years of pain and family...?" This question arises late in Year of the Horse, cult filmmaker Jim Jarmusch's documentary about Neil Young & Crazy Horse. It is aimed directly at Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise, Night on Earth, Mystery Train) by Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro in the always interesting one-on-one interviews with band members that make up a large part of the film. Jarmusch doesn't answer, but allows his subject to continue to question his intentions in directing a film about the on-and off-stage struggles and triumphs of a band...
...hand over Year of the Horse to Young alone. What makes the biographical parts of the film most interesting is that the real focus is Neil Young and Crazy Horse--how they became not just bandmates but brothers: Young (guitar/vocals), Ralph Molina (drums/vocals), Billy Talbot (bass) and Frank "Poncho Sampedro." It's this aspect--their powerful sense of family--that saves their story from being just another tale of a '70s band...
Apart from the ability to shake his head and an occasional involuntary flailing of his arms, the 52-year-old Sampedro is a prisoner within a paralyzed body. Propped up in bed in the farmhouse where he lives with his brother, sister-in-law and his aged father, he can see from his window the coast at Xuno and the restless Atlantic beyond. It was at this beach 26 years ago that Sampedro, a mechanic, dived into a rock pool and struck his head on the bottom...
...There is a test I apply to people who say I must go on living,'' says Sampedro. ``I ask, `Swap places with me. Would you want to?' They admit they wouldn't.'' With a beautiful smile and a sense of humor tuned by long hours of reading--his shelves hold translations of Swift, Wilde, Flaubert--Sampedro says if he cannot have his life ended in predominantly Roman Catholic Spain, one option is to be taken to the Netherlands...
...some months before Sampedro and Jorge Arroyo, his pro bono lawyer, learn whether Strasbourg will hear their plea, the first such to be put to the commission. Says Sampedro: ``Death is a taboo in our society. But for a psychologically mature person, voluntary death, when it is to bring to an end an incurable or intolerable suffering, is rational.'' A poem he has written called ``Why Die?'' answers itself in the first line: ``Porque el sueno se ha vuelto pesadilla'' (Because the dream has become a nightmare...