DOCUMENTARY SERIES - ENGLISH - USA

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* Recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant

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SERIES CREATOR, WRITER & PRODUCER: Lowell Handler

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Logline: Of Different Minds: Tales of Neurodiversity aims to expand public understanding of the challenges and sometimes blessings that come with neurodiversity. What makes this series unlike any other is that it speaks from a place of unusual authority—our directors are themselves neurodivergent or share their lives directly with someone who is.
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Episodes: 
1. DYSLEXIA AND DYSGRAPHIA
2. TOURETTE’S SYNDROME and OCD
3. ATTENTION DEFICIT-HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER
4. EPILEPSY
5. TBD
6. Wrap-up, collage, summary

​Lead Production Companies: Handler Productions, MediaFusion Entertainment
Senior Lender: ScreenLight Media Fund
Fiscal Sponsor: From the Heart Productions, Oxnard, CA
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Production Team: 

• Writer/Creator: Lowell Handler

• Producers: Lowell Handler, Carol Bidault de l’Isle

• Producer: David Petersen, Beaufort9Films, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated director/producer

• Executive Producer: Kate Edgar, Director, Oliver Sacks Foundation

• Music: Malcolm Burn, Grammy-winning music producer

• Director of Photography: Wolfgang Held, Emmy-winning DP

• Marketing: Paul Cadieux of Filmoption International, Oscar-nominated and Genie Award-winning producer

• Production Counsel: Daniel Sirkin

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Location: New York
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Production Start Date: February 2027
 
​Comps: Of Different Minds is a unique series that combines aspects of HBO’s intimate character documentary, Asperger’s Are Us, with Netflix’s scientific deep dive, The Mind Explained. It is set apart by the fact that all our directors are themselves neurodivergent or the partners or caregivers of someone who is. Their personal stories of discovery, coping, and acceptance will be central to the narrative. Each of our filmmakers has been chosen not only for these experiences but also for their proven ability to communicate with a wide audience.

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Episodes & Directors: 

​- TOURETTE’S SYNDROME and OCD: Directed by Lowell Handler. Handler, a

photojournalist, served as associate producer, photographer, co-writer, narrator, and presenter of the Emmy-nominated PBS film Twitch and Shout and is the author of a memoir of the same name about his life with Tourette’s syndrome.
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- ATTENTION DEFICIT-HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER: Directed by Danae Elon. A filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer whose documentary films have won dozens of awards. Elon is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. All three of her teenagers were diagnosed with ADHD in childhood.
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​- EPILEPSY: Directed by David Petersen. A director and writer, David is both Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated. His most recent film, Lift, is being distributed by Paramount. A look at epilepsy through the personal experience of the director’s 9-year-old daughter, whose condition profoundly affects her childhood and the family.
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- DYSLEXIA AND DYSGRAPHIA: Directed by Nathan Fitch, an award-winning
cinematographer and director. Dyslexia is more than a learning difference—it is a different way of processing language and symbols. In the dyslexic brain, signals between the eyes, ears, and language centers follow alternate pathways, creating both challenges and unique patterns of thought. The director and his young daughter both have the condition.

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About Series Creator: Lowell Handler
 

Lowell Handler is a photographer, filmmaker, and author whose pictures have appeared in The New Yorker, Life, Newsweek, Elle, U.S. News & World Report, The (London) Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazines, as well as journals from Brazil to Japan.

​Handler served as associate producer, narrator, presenter, co-writer, and photographer for the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Twitch and Shout, which won the San Francisco International Film Festival and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lowell also wrote a memoir of the same name about his life with Tourette syndrome (Penguin, 1998). He has directed two short documentary films (Terefu and Her Children, 

Bernardo and Veronica) and released an eBook, Crazy and Proud, that includes a video he produced.

​Lowell was the technical consultant and set photographer on the film Niagara, Niagara, starring Robin Tunney and Henry Thomas; the still photographer on Gary Winick’s feature The Tic Code, starring Gregory Hines; and partial inspiration for the touretting detective, played by Ed Norton in the film Motherless Brooklyn (Nov. 2019), based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel.

Handler is featured in Ric Burns' 2021 PBS American Masters Series documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and in Sacks’ last posthumous book, Everything in its Place (Knopf, April 2019), which includes a chapter called Travels with Lowell that chronicles their travels together. Terefu and Her Children, a short documentary about a family of Ethiopian Jews in Israel,
directed by Lowell, was distributed by WGBH on YouTube.

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