Variety describes it as
a film "mixing ferocity with tenderness, delicacy with tenacity" —
exactly like the unusual school it explores. In Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, one
of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers takes a vérité look at Oxford's
Mulberry Bush School for emotionally disturbed children. Mulberry's heroically
forbearing staff greets extreme, sometimes violent behavior with only
consolation and gentle restraint. Kim Longinotto's unblinking camera captures
an arduous process and a nearly unhinged environment, but it also records the
daily dramas of troubled kids trying to survive and the moments of hope they
achieve with Mulberry's clear-eyed staff.