In Vivien's Wild Ride, a filmmaker loses her eyesight but retains her vision.

      “I’m truly grateful I experimented with acid in the ‘60s,” starts Vivien’s Wild Ride, a cinematic memoir from an experienced film editor reflecting on her life as she deals with diminishing eyesight. “It kind of prepared me for this unique visual realm I now occupy.”

      What follows is a blend of narration, poetic visuals, historical b-roll, and classic film snippets drawn from Vivien Hillgrove’s 50-year journey as a sound and picture editor, resulting in a remarkable directorial debut, especially considering she could barely see the dailies during production.

      “Losing your sight is a compelling narrative,” Hillgrove states. “It's incredibly remarkable. However, life doesn’t abandon you when your vision fades.

      “I was given an amazing opportunity to address it through creative expression,” she continues, “which was astonishing — that there were people supporting the film's creation from its inception.”

      One of those supporters is Deann Borshay Liem, a documentary filmmaker who produced Vivien’s Wild Ride after collaborating with Hillgrove as an editor on several of her projects.

      “What struck me was witnessing her loss of eyesight and yet transforming it into a visually stunning film,” Liem shares. “The way Viv expressed what she envisioned despite her impaired vision was truly remarkable to observe.”

      While the concept of Vivien’s Wild Ride is especially intriguing for those in the film industry — as it may seem like a distressing scenario — the underlying narrative is far richer, exploring a captivating life filled with both tragedy and triumph.

      Hillgrove's early years include a teenage pregnancy in the early ‘60s, during which her parents compelled her to give the baby up for adoption. This profound loss lingers with her for many years and seems to relate to her more recent vision loss, which has worsened since finishing the film.

      The macular degeneration that has affected her sight began with blurriness: letters disappeared from words, details faded from objects, and then faces were obscured.

      This condition is diagnosed in over 200,000 individuals annually and impacts each person differently.

      As one individual in a support group featured in the film explains, it’s challenging for friends and family to grasp how macular degeneration influences daily life and to comprehend that it does not improve. This was a significant inspiration for Hillgrove to convey her experience on film.

      “My primary goal was to find a way to communicate this to people who either live with or care for those losing their vision — providing them with a visual reference point for understanding,” she says.

      “I’ve received numerous calls saying, ‘Suddenly, my family comprehends what I see when experiencing macular degeneration.’ If it alters or enhances understanding about macular degeneration, I’ll be happy.”

      Regarding how a director with vision impairment creates a film, Hillgrove remarks, “I was practically two inches from the monitor. I hope I didn’t cause myself any harm,” she laughs. “And my editor assisted me by replaying scenes I was uncertain about.”

      Her sharp photographic memory, honed from editing many films, was also crucial to the project.

      “I memorized the film when my sight was better than it was towards the end,” she notes. “But you certainly memorize the dailies; that’s just a talent of editing.”

      Hillgrove began her career in the late ‘60s, working in sound mixing and editing for industrial and educational films in San Francisco. She even edited a few adult films under the alias Lorraine Sprocket before moving towards the burgeoning experimental film movement in the Bay Area following the psychedelic Summer of Love.

      She asserts that LSD and other hallucinogens “broadened my perspective about community, making it significantly more important than individual suffering.”

      This experience instilled in her a desire to portray a range of emotions on film that might not have been as expansive, “had I not explored psychotropics at that specific point in my life.”

      Her breakthrough came after she secured a room at American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s studio, to edit low-budget family films. Surrounded by pioneers like Philip Kaufman and Walter Murch, she began collaborating with them, editing dialogue for Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff and Miloš Forman’s 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus. She continued with Murch, editing Kaufman’s 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and later contributed to Kaufman’s 1990 Henry & June.

      Then, following a moral dilemma, she shifted to editing documentaries, forming a long collaboration with renowned Mexican documentarian Lourdes Portillo, whom she describes as “one of the bravest people I’ve ever known.”

      As Hillgrove began to lose her vision, she started to refine her hearing and realized the mental imagery it could evoke.

      “The audio taught me a lot,” she explains. “Around 70% of the film, if not more, relies on audio. It conveys a