The Sessions

“The festival hit of the year!”

In Berkeley, Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) has lived since childhood with polio, spending most of each day in an iron lung while working as a journalist and poet. An assignment on sex and the disabled leaves him curious about his own experience, and after a caregiver backs away, he books an appointment with the sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene (Helen Hunt). Ben Lewin stages the sessions quietly and plainly, mostly in a single rented room.