Jean Vanier in Summer in the Forest (R2W Films)

The new film Summer in the Forest is a retreat — into full life.

‘They taught me what it really means to be a human person, to love and let the barriers down,” Summer in the Forest director Randall Wright explains about his experience with Summer in the Forest. I’ve not yet met the person who can watch Summer in the Forest and not be changed.


Maybe it helps to “become a child” while watching it, as Jean Vanier advises (and about approaching not just the film but life). Maybe that explains the smiles and the tears. Summer in the Forest is a documentary about L’Arche, a community for men and women with intellectual disabilities. Established by Vanier in France, it now has a presence around the world, in some 30 countries,.

“People with disabilities are not seeking power, but friendship,” Vanier explains during the course of the film. As we see in the lives of those featured in it, that liberates them to embrace freedom and even foolishness.

“As you laugh together, as you have fun together, barriers drop,” he explains. “Presence is taking time and wasting time, apparently to become who we are all called to be.”


One L’Arche community member in Bethlehem describes Vanier as having “a big heart,” one that “is pure.” “We love Jean Vanier.”


They love him because he chooses to see them and meet them in similarities, not differences. “We’re all fragile,” Vanier says during the course of Summer in the Forest. “For peace, accept weakness,” he says at one point in the film. “Weakness becomes a transmission of a cry, and the end of that cry is crying together.”

“The big human problem is just to accept people as they are,” he also says. He suggests going “into the dark room where our fears are.” Because “so often, we are controlled by our fears.”

When we “move from anger to compassion,” our “road becomes fidelity to the weak.” “It’s a long road, and that is what people have difficulty with.”

‘People with disabilities are not seeking power, but friendship,’ Vanier explains in the film. That liberates them to embrace freedom, even foolishness.

It’s fairly simply but foundational. A message for all of us, because it’s ultimately about all of us. In a Q&A session after Summer in the Forest opened in New York, Randall Wright confessed that when he arrived at L’Arche to film, he was at a point in life where he was “ready to find a place I believed in that shows us how we should live or at least give us hope.” As he spent time with the residents, the story became theirs, not his, as they took him places — including a memorial to the people who were put on the last train to the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp. The touch could have been heavy-handed had it been directed. As a natural part of the storyline — a resident directing by following to the place where his mind and memories go — it is exactly what we need to see and reflect on. It’s a spotlight on what indifference to hatred and hatred of differences can do.

In a mediation that appeared in the Tablet for Easter, Vanier wrote:

Many of us live in a state of unease. We may not be fully aware of it, but we often carry a hidden burden that is close to guilt. We all know the gospel message exemplified by the story of the poor man covered in sores who lives in the streets near the home of a very rich man who feasts sumptuously every day (Luke 16:19–31). The end of the parable is painful to read. Is Jesus asking us to sell everything we have and give all to the poor? Surely that is not possible. Don’t we have a family? What about our children, who need feeding and clothing?

I might add that because that seems impossible, as the duty just to provide for family can be so overwhelming for some, aren’t we living in a culture where there seems to be a resentment for people who might look to us for help? That’s some of how Summer in the Forest helps right now; it’s seemingly made for this moment. To reintroduce tenderness in the face of evil.

Vanier writes:

Jesus on the feast of the Resurrection looks at each one of us with more love than we can dare believe. He forgives us our shortcomings; he frees us from our guilt. He then sends us off to forgive others, so that they can be free from guilt. Each one of us is called to bring peace where there is conflict. We are not all called to sell everything we have. We are all called to be committed to one person who is in pain, who is lonely and lost and who needs a friend.

He adds: “This is the Resurrection.”

Whatever your beliefs or opinions about religion, Summer in the Forest is an invitation to enter into life fully human. I’m not sure we live that, the fullness of humanity, when we are running from appointment to appointment, scrolling and clicking and pontificating on whatever it is that’s in the news today (often, it seems increasingly, because someone has tweeted it). Summer in the Forest is a retreat on film, drawing us into a better life.