Recommended Films
Blue End
Kaspar Kasics
85 min.
First Run/Icarus Films
Joseph Paul Jernigan was 39 years old when he was executed in Huntsville,
Texas, in 1993. Ten minutes after the lethal injection he was handed over
to scientists Victor Spitzer and Michael Ackerman, transported to Denver,
frozen in blue gelatin and, over a period of four months, planed off, millimeter-by-millimeter,
and photographed. When Jernigan was convicted no one, including Jernigan,
had foreseen that he would be reborn on the Internet as the "visible man":
the first completely digitized human being, a third millennium prototype
of human anatomy. This worldwide, digitally distributed Visible Human Project
is the result of a unique interaction between justice and science, between
family destiny and American career planning, and between the helplessness
of the individual and the power of scientific ambition.
Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien
Jessica Yu
35 min.
Fanlight Productions
Mark O'Brien, a journalist and poet, contracted polio in childhood, and has
spent much of his life in an iron lung. For more than forty years, he has fought
against illness, bureaucracy and society's conflicting perceptions of disability,
to lead an independent life. Incorporating the vivid imagery of O'Brien's poetry,
and his candid, wry and often profound reflections on work, sex, death and
God, this provocative film asks: what makes a life worth living?
The Child the Stork Brought Home
Gillian Goslinga Roy
59 min.
Documentary Organizational
Resources
The Child the Stork Brought Home is an intimate portrait of a gestational
surrogacy arrangement, from the embryo transfer that "took" and got both
the gestational surrogate and genetic parents "pregnant," to the birth of
a slightly premature baby girl 34 weeks later. The film captures, through
spaced interviews and cinema verite scenes; doctor visits, the baby shower,
the birth and its emotional aftermath. The ethical complexity of this most
controversial of reproductive arrangements is revealed, at once celebrating
its potential to transform understandings of the nuclear family and motherhood,
while raising an alarm: that class privilege, and genetic laboratory assisted
procreation, can seem to make breeders out of gestational surrogates.
Community Voices: Exploring Cross-Cultural Care through Cancer
Jennie Greene, M.S., and Kim Newell, M.D.
69 min.
Fanlight Productions
Hear the voices and perspectives of nurses, doctors, outreach workers, medical
interpreters, and patients - people from a fascinating range of back-grounds,
who make up today's healthcare system. This innovative video offers a window
into the challenges and rewards of cross-cultural healthcare. Drawing on the
insights of community, healthcare, and academic leaders, it helps to integrate
cultural awareness and skill building into training programs for all health
professionals. Community Voices uses cancer as a lens to explore
the many ways that differences in culture, race and ethnicity affect health
and the delivery of healthcare services. Its six clearly defined sections are
intended as triggers for discussion. They explore language, interpretation
and communication styles; the meanings of illness; patterns of help seeking;
social and historical context; core cultural issues; and building bridges.
Dax's Case: Who Should Decide?
Keith Burton
58 min.
Partnership
for Caring
This gripping documentary struggles with a profoundly troubling bioethical
problem. Under what circumstances does a severely injured patient have the
right to refuse treatment? This film is unique because it spans a ten-year
period. This is an outstanding resource to provoke a debate about the complex
issues that occur in decision making. Useful for working with students in ethics,
medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy and others that struggle with these
difficult questions. The video is designed to be used in two parts.
Death on Request
Maarten Nederhorst
57 min.
Fanlight Productions
This powerful new film from The Netherlands presents the issues of euthanasia
from the very human perspectives of those involved, without venturing into
social, political or ethical polemics. Following a man who is in the last stages
of Lou Gehrig's disease as he chooses euthanasia to end his suffering, this
moving documentary includes his perspective and those of his wife and his physician,
as it explores the emotional, ethical and medical complexity of this contemporary
dilemma.
Dreams and Dilemmas
Richard Kahn, with the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College
58 min.
Fanlight Productions
Advances in neonatal medicine have dramatically improved the survival chances
of premature infants, yet survival can come at a high cost. Many such infants
experience severe and often life-threatening health problems, and their parents
and caregivers may confront enormously difficult and troubling decisions. This
compelling new documentary follows one couple and their premature twin sons
over the course of six months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Without
narration or preaching, it allows viewers to experience and share in the dilemmas
confronted by parents and by their nurses, physicians, social worker and hospital
chaplain.
Grave Words
Produced and Directed by Maren Grainger-Monsen, M.D.
Co-Produced by Elizabeth Thompson
25 minutes
Fanlight Productions
Learning to talk with patients about resuscitation and other end-of-life care
decisions is a challenge for many physicians and other healthcare providers,
yet has become an increasingly important, perhaps even essential aspect of
good medical practice. Directed by physician Maren Grainger-Monsen, Grave Words
takes a unique approach to this topic by blending humor, upbeat music, and
insightful interviews to confront head-on the issues that arise in such end-of-life
discussions.
The Life and Times of Sara Baartman - "The
Hottentot Venus"
Zola Maseko
53 min.
First Run/Icarus Films
When 20-year-old Sara Baartman got on a boat that was to take her from Cape
Town to London in 1810, she could not have known that she would never see her
home again. Nor, as she stood on the deck and saw her homeland disappear behind
her could she have known that she would become the icon of racial inferiority
and black female sexuality for the next 100 years. Using historical drawings,
cartoons, legal documents, and interviews with noted cultural historians and
anthropologists, The Life and Times of Sara Bartman - "The Hottentot Venus" deconstructs
the social, political, scientific and philosophical assumptions which transformed
one young African woman into a representation of savage sexuality and racial
inferiority.
A Question of Genes: Inherited Risks
Noel Schwerin
1 hr., 46 min.
PBS
When a woman tests positive for a high possibility of breast cancer, should
she consider a preemptive mastectomy? Should it be permissible for companies
to use genetic testing to determine insurability? When a single genetic marker
implicates more than one disease, should the doctor tell the patient all the
possible consequences? This program explores these and other perplexing questions
raised by genetic testing. As the Human Genome Project progresses, the uses
of genetic research will continue to be hotly debated while the repercussions
test society's values and beliefs.
Sound and Fury
Josh Aronson
1 hr., 20 min.
PBS
Sound and Fury documents one family's struggle over whether or not
to provide two deaf children with cochlear implants, devices that can stimulate
hearing. As the Artinians of Long Island, New York debate what is the right
choice for the two deaf cousins, Heather, 6, and Peter, 1 1/2, viewers are
introduced to one of the most controversial issues affecting the deaf community
today. Cochlear implants may provide easier access to the hearing world, but
what do the devices mean for a person's sense of identity with deaf culture?
Can durable bridges be built between the deaf and hearing worlds?
Still Life: The Anatomy of Humanity
Thomas R. Cole, Ph.D.
27 min.
Fanlight Productions
Each year, 16,000 medical students in the United States dissect cadavers as
part of their introduction to medicine. Their emotional reactions to the experience
are often intense, sometimes traumatic, and may shape the way they will relate
to their future patients. This unusual documentary probes the imaginative "shadow
traffic" between the living and the dead. Crafted from interviews with 'gross
anatomy' students, medical faculty, and a man who plans to donate his body
to the medical school, it explores the unstated but powerful relationship between
medical student dissectors and the cadavers which make it possible for them
to learn about the human body.
The Vanishing Line
Maren Grainger-Monsen, M.D.
52 minutes
First Run/Icarus Films
When does life become a fate worse than death? In this age of medical "miracles," increasing
numbers of doctors, patients and their families are forced to face this question.
Physician and filmmaker Maren Grainger-Monsen offers an intensely personal
look at this modern medical dilemma as she takes us on a lyrical and heartfelt
quest to discover an "art of dying" in a world that taught her well to prolong
life, but offered few prescriptions for treating death.
Worlds Apart
Produced by Maren Grainger-Monsen, M.D., and Julia Haslett
4 videos, each between 10-14 minutes
Fanlight Productions
Produced by award-winning physician/filmmaker Maren Grainger-Monsen and filmmaker
Julia Haslett, the films follow patients and families faced with critical medical
decisions as they navigate their way through the health care system. Shot in
patients' homes, neighborhoods, and places of worship, hospital wards and community
clinics, Worlds Apart provides a balanced yet penetrating look at both the
patient's culture and the culture of medicine.
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