It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Jonathan Charbonneau.
While “Superman” flew into theaters and helped save the box office this summer, documentary short “Saving Superman” packs just as big an emotional punch in a fraction of the time. In fact, co-directors Adam Oppenheim and Samuel-Ali Mirpoorian’s 11-minute doc about a 57-year-old Glen Ellyn man with autism taught them plenty about the human experience in the process.
“The biggest thing that we wanted to accomplish with this film was to dive as deep as we possibly could without being redundant. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel by any means. Like, how can we tell this deeply personal story that does have this delicacy in the most appropriate and wholesome way?” Mirpoorian told TheWrap. “I was curious if we had the chops, if we could do it the right way, and how we would resonate with folks. The biggest thing I took away was if you do things with the right intentions and you do them as honestly as possible and you just care, the best outcome comes about.”
“We need to have empathy for others, understanding for others, and not just rush to judgment just because somebody isn’t like you or has different needs than you. Practice patience with folks that might have different needs and show empathy wherever you can in life. It’s worth it,” Oppenheim elaborated. “[Jonathan] is like a parade float all his own. He is the biggest star of the show. It was really, really emotional witnessing it, very visceral, just really profound to see the love that people have for him.”
“Saving Superman” tells the story of Charbonneau, his mother Sandra and his best friend Julie, who helped organize a community movement to raise money for their Chicago suburb’s local celebrity after his rent was raised astronomically overnight. It also gives Charbonneau the space to share his interests — including most instruments, Superman and, eventually, parades — after a lifetime of adversity.
“Adam’s Aunt Julie, who is also a protagonist in the film, is quasi-caretaker for Jonathan, so we’ve known them, obviously, since our teenage years, our 20s; probably 15-plus years or so,” Mirpoorian explained. “We’ve always wanted to tell this story, it was just a matter of the right timing.”
“She’s very busy, not only with the care that she provides to Jonathan, but the care that she provides to my adult cousin with special needs and she also owns a business, so she’s hard to pin down,” Oppenheim continued. “But she reached out, not more than a few days before the Fourth of July, and said, ‘Hey, if you want to shoot this year, it’s a good time.’ There’s so many questions swirling in my head, but there was no time to decide; there was only one decision to make, and that was whether or not to go do it or not, not knowing whether we’d actually capture a film, part of a film, nothing — it could have been a total disaster, but the gut feeling was just to go do it.”
The 2025 Critics Choice Documentary Awards winner for Best Short Doc also boasts some A-list talent behind-the-scenes, as Oscar-winning actor Brendan Fraser is on board as an executive producer. He even teared up while discussing the project on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” last month.
“The Brendan Fraser/Kelly Clarkson thing was pretty huge,” Mirpoorian shared. “I think the biggest thing people really enjoy about it was that Jonathan was really given the agency to really just talk about any experience that any human of any walk of life would want to talk about. Jonathan is a participant, he’s a character like in any other film, any other story; we wanted to give him the respect and care that everyone deserves.”
“I don’t even have words to describe what it means when one of your heroes not only is willing to give their time and their voice to a project that that means so much to us, but now means so much to the world,” Oppenheim added. “Without him, the film would have only had so much reach and now it’s gone all over the world. It’s truly just an absolute honor, it’s a pleasure. We hope that this is the beginning of a relationship that we can nurture into future projects.”
“Saving Superman” is now available to stream.
