Dealt

Richard Turner is sixty-two and reckoned one of the finest card mechanics in the world; he is also completely blind. At the centre of the documentary is not a trick but a refusal: Turner will not have himself called blind, does not carry a cane, does not ask for help, and has made that the foundation of who he is. He practises for hours every day, and his hands are on a deck even while he sleeps. Luke Korem's film also shows what the refusal costs: the hardest part is how his family, and his son in particular, live with the stance. The card work is there, of course, and it is genuinely astonishing, but the documentary is less a performance piece than a study of a man learning to loosen the story he tells about himself. Turner's background in karate and his physical discipline stand as another face of the same insistence.