The moments when singer Celine Dion suffers a crisis due to her illness, stiff-person syndrome, were not edited out of the documentary I am: Celine Dionnow available in Ecuador on the platform Prime Video.
Apparently, the attack happened suddenly during filming and the cameras continued rolling.
The documentary starts off strong, with a medical intervention in a hotel room, a scene recorded while the singer lies on the floor, unable to even answer questions due to the pain. She immediately gets context: she suffers from a syndrome that only affects one or two people in a million.
“Last year I got so bad I couldn’t even walk. I lost my balance and it hurt a lot. I still can’t use my voice. I miss the music a lot, but also the people,” she says.
The documentary, approximately 90 minutes, is a summary of a series of revelations that Dion has been offering to her followers in recent years to explain her absence from the stage.
“I can’t take any more lies,” he states in that production in which he acknowledges, for example, that due to the rigid person syndrome that he began to suffer from 17 years ago, the medication necessary to alleviate the pain increased significantly.
Thus, the interpreter of the central theme of Titanic She says that she took “between 80 and 90 milligrams of Valium a day.” “And that was just Valium,” the Canadian emphasizes. Another of her confessions was that it became increasingly necessary to resort to different tricks to hide her illness from the public as she began to lose control of her voice.
“He cheated, like hitting the microphone as if it were the fault of the sound. Sometimes we had to stop Show to change my clothes, but I didn’t come back,” he recalls about nights in which the medication stopped working in the middle of the performance.
Although she remains stoic, tears flow without being able to stop them during much of the footage and she desperately shows how this syndrome affects her once vocal virtuosity. “I think she was great, I did spectacular things,” she sobs when remembering the highest point of her career with All By Myself.
She shares intimate scenes with two of her children, visits a warehouse where she keeps many of the most spectacular models she has worn on the red carpets and regularly visits her physiotherapist, who closely follows all her progress.
“The journey is not over. We must continue taking steps,” her doctor consoles her, in front of a Celine Dion whose doing what she adores, singing, can cause these crises due to brain overstimulation.
“If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl. I’m not going to stop.”
