This video may have you not believing your own eyes. From filmmaker Sebastian Mlynarski, “Magic Man” follows a street magician going by “Justin Sight.” And here’s the catch: Sight is legally blind, and his clever tricks have become his main avenue for connecting with people.
Now 23, Sight was born as Adam Jaslikowski, and at 10, he learned his failing vision was due to Stargardt’s macular degeneration. “I would say I was always different, in general, as a kid,” the magician says in the video. “I knew that they saw me as this disheveled, weird, blind kid. If I didn’t have the magic, I’d’ve been even more isolated.”
Since Sight often looks directly—albeit unseeing—at people and things, his blindness isn’t immediately obvious. “At first I did not register that the young man surrounded by amazed spectators was blind. His eyes focused elsewhere while his hands kept maneuvering and producing the impossible,” Mlynarski told Slate in an email.
What is obvious, though, is that Sight is a master magician, performing mystifying card tricks and doing things to spectators’ hands—an x drawn here, a card healing itself there—without them even noticing. His audience is, as one might expect, delighted and dumbfounded. That he’s blind makes what he does seem that much harder to believe.
As to what he gets out of his crowd-pleasing tricks, Sight says, “The idea of being able to just shatter someone’s way of seeing the world for a few minutes has always appealed to me.”
