Discussions in Bioethics: The Old Person's Friend

Tahani Rached’s powerful documentary enters the doors of an AIDS clinic in Montreal. We meet a group of dedicated doctors struggling to provide health care to their patients. This 1994 film explores legal and ethical problems surrounding HIV/AIDS and the struggle against fear, rumours and prejudice. It is still relevant today. In French with English subtitles.

This documentary introduces us to Stephen Jenkinson, once the leader of a palliative care counselling team at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. Through his daytime job, he has been at the deathbed of well over 1,000 people. What he sees over and over, he says, is "a wretched anxiety and an existential terror" even when there is no pain. Indicting the practice of palliative care itself, he has made it his life's mission to change the way we die - to turn the act of dying from denial and resistance into an essential part of life.

This feature documentary tackles a taboo subject: the tragic effects of life-sustaining medical treatment on infants. Through the courageous testimony of a handful of doctors and therapists as well as the shocking stories told by devoted parents of disabled children, this film denounces the lack of support offered to science's little "miracles." Once saved, the children are more or less left to their fate by a medical system that does not give them the therapy needed to improve their quality of life and develop to their fullest potential.

In this short film, a 17-year-old girl refuses medical treatment that will prolong her life due to religious convictions. Her decision remains firm despite the pleas of her physician, who begins to question who has the right to determine a person's life or death.

This feature documentary is a portrait of Robert Coley-Donohue a man living with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal degenerative neuro-muscular disease that strikes two in 100,000 people. The film follows Robert over the last 3 years of his life. His experience is arduous, but also filled with hope and healing. If, like Robert, we can face death with grace and the comfort of family and friends, then death will hold less fear.

This award-winning documentary presents Mark Nowaczynski, a physician who photographs the lives of many of his elderly patients. "Who in the world would want to see a bunch of pictures of me? Junk," says Connie, 93. Yet "Dr. Mark" has been photographing her and other patients to raise awareness about the lack of home care in this growing segment of the population. His black-and-white pictures reflect faces that convey fragility and vulnerability but also quiet strength as these seniors struggle to live with dignity.

In this feature-length documentary, acclaimed filmmaker Dorothy Todd Hénaut chronicles a critical two-year period in the lives of her parents, Mildred and Bob Todd. The Todds, retired octogenarians, live a simple but full life by the river in rural Ontario until a sudden change in their health forces a change in their lives. Their old routine of tending the garden and visiting with friends is replaced by hospital stays and home care. And even though the couple’s tenderness and mutual care soften the reality of diminishing strength, Hénaut’s film reveals a gritty, sensitive look at the human aging process.

In a moving conversation with Dr. Balfour M. Mount, friend, colleague and treating physician, cancer victim Jean Cameron, a one-time volunteer social worker in the Palliative Care Unit of Montréal's Royal Victoria hospital, discusses how she has come to terms with her own illness and the perspective it has given her on the meaning of life. What she has to say is relevant to all. The depth of her insight and the grace of her being leave viewers moved and open to thinking more carefully about the meaning of their own lives.

This documentary is about Edmonton filmmaker Joe Viszmeg and his battle with cancer. In 1991, Viszmeg was diagnosed with adrenal cancer and told he wouldn’t live through the year. Four years later, he made In My Own Time—Diary of a Cancer Patient. In My Healing Journey: Seven Years with Cancer, he tells the story of how he survived the roller coaster of a deadly disease. He died in 1999.

This short documentary filmed at Saint Boniface General Hospital, in Manitoba, focuses on the work of 2 women: Gisèle Fontaine, who helps women in childbirth; and Louise Saurette, who attends the dying. Birth and death, moments of transition that involve a transformative journey, have much in common. The midwife and the chaplain offer themselves as guides on the painful and essential path of letting go.

This documentary short was produced as part of the Tremplin program, which enables young Francophone filmmakers to make a first production in a professional context.

Marguerite Paquin lives in a seniors’ home where 14 nuns from her religious congregation have succumbed to COVID-19. The film takes us from the grandeur of the landscapes of Côte-Nord, Quebec, where Marguerite has worked for 47 years, into the room where she sits confined today, finding a sort of liberation through prayer and unshakeable solidarity with her sisters who are suffering.

Part of THE CURVE, a collection of social distancing stories that bring us together. Enjoy more works from this series here .