Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007 - (Page 26)

Nicholas with his devoted mothers, Gwen Baba (left) and Nicole Conn (right). Nicholas does still require 24/7 nursing care and lives with monitors to regulate his heart rate, breathing, and body temperature. But overall, he’s doing very well. “Motherly devotion at its most primal” The story of little Nicholas’ struggle is suspenseful and intense, from the time the ﬁrst ultrasound on his surrogate mother reveals that he is behind schedule in his development until the screen goes black. Throughout the film, one haunting question resounds: “How small can medicine get?” Today, despite being the smallest baby ever born at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and once having worn blood pressure cuffs the size of Band-Aids, Nicholas is five years old and doing surprisingly well. “Nicholas was on oxygen for so long that his lungs didn’t fully develop, and he wears thick glasses and a hearing aid,” Hoven says. “But considering what he went through, he’s doing great, and it makes it all worth it when you see him smile.” Conn adds: “Nicholas is a feisty and energetic 5-year-old now, who—like any young child—is much more interested in exploring the universe and playing than anything else. After three-and-a-half years of living on a central IV line and being hospitalized as many as 18 times in a given year, I am pleased to say that Nicholas is central line free and that he lives a much more normal and much less medically complicated life. Nicholas does still require 24/7 nursing care and lives with monitors to regulate his heart rate, breathing, and body temperature. But overall, he’s doing very well.” Less importantly but no less notably, all of Hoven and Conn’s hard work on Little Man has paid off in the ﬁlm world as well. “The dream of doing a documentary is making it into festivals—there is not a lot of money to be made in them unless you are Michael Moore, so just getting the funding for the project is half the battle,” Hoven says. Little Man not only got the funding it needed, it garnered accolades at numerous film festivals. Among others, Little Man won Best Documentary Audience Award at Los Angeles Outfest and the San Diego Film Festival and the Best Documentary Jury Award at the New York NewFest and Chicago Indiefest. The documentary debuted nationally on the Showtime premium cable network in 2006. Reviewers have called Little Man everything from a “deeply personal, often wrenching documentary” (The Hollywood Reporter) to “an altogether riveting portrait of motherly devotion at its most primal” (The LA Times). As a filmmaker, Conn says she’s always reaching for awards. “However, the greatest reward has been the thousands of letters we have gotten from around the globe telling us how parents of other premature babies and/or disabled children have been so profoundly affected by seeing their lives up on screen,” she says. “I have also gotten letters from so many young people—not yet parents—who write to tell me that the ﬁlm showed them how much a parent can love their child and they now appreciate their moms, or have called them to thank them for all they were given as children,” she says. To touch viewers so deeply, Conn and her partner had to reveal the most intimate parts of their own lives, including an initial disagreement between them on whether Nicholas should live or die. “The documentary is pretty powerful and there are so many different elements to the story,” Hoven says. “When we started it, we knew we had so much footage of Nicholas, but we didn’t want it to be just a hospital-type ﬁlm, so we decided to introduce the rest of the family into it to demonstrate the effect of the situation on the family. My sister and her partner opened up their doors for a lot of people to see….” Her ﬁrst “little man” Conn offers many words of praise about her brother…her ﬁrst little man. “Brian is so wonderfully multitalented, and he was so instrumental in ‘birthing this documentary.’ A couple of months after Brian was born, our father suffered a massive stroke that took him away for months of rehabilitation, and at age 14, I was Brian’s fill-in mother—I think it was during that time that I learned to cherish adorable little babies,” she says. While at Lehigh, Hoven was as well-rounded as he is now; he graduated in 1996 with the unusual combination of a major in accounting and a minor in music. “I play a lot of instruments— mostly piano and guitar, but I also play the violin, trumpet, and saxophone,” he says. Hoven graduated from Lehigh with a full-time 26 lehigh alumni bulletin

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Table of Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Arts & Culture Sports Research Cover Story - Forward March Little Man Overcomes Huge Odds Lights, Camera...Antiques Linderman Renewed From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

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