![]() ![]() One of the best films in the festival, expertly shot by Bay Area filmmaker Peter Nicks, “The Waiting Room” is an astounding and moving look at a typical shift at Oakland’s Highland Hospital. Of all the memorable films on offer at Silverdocs, the most haunting by far is “The Waiting Room,” Peter Nicks’s engrossing cinema verite film set in the emergency room of the Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. The Waiting Room doesn’t simply shed light on a broken healthcare system like the best dramas, it humbly illuminates the human condition without narration or agenda.Ī rock-solid verite docu provides ample evidence why our national health-care system needs fixing. It is frustrating, to be sure, but that’s sort of the point. The Waiting Room is often dryly funny it’s very tense at times it’s emotional, and it’s not didactic, which it easily could have been. The Scramble For Care In ‘The Waiting Room’ The daily life of a large, under-resourced, urban public hospital, a new documentary offers no experts and no statistics, just a rare fly-on-the-wall look inside an overwhelmed and at times overwhelming system and its impact on patients and staff. New Documentary Explores Challenge to Public Hospitals in Serving Uninsured which is solely responsible for its content. The Waiting Room is produced by Open’hood, Inc. The Waiting Room was produced in part with the support of Firelight Media. and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), in association with Peer Review Films. The Waiting Room is a co-production of Open’hood, Inc. Major funding for this film was provided by It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans. The Waiting Room lays bare the struggle and determination of both a community and an institution coping with limited resources and no road map for navigating a health care landscape marked by historic economic and political dysfunction. The film weaves the stories of several patients – as well as the hospital staff charged with caring for them – as they cope with the complexity of the nation’s public health care system, while weathering the storm of a national recession. Steel workers, taxi cab drivers and international asylum seekers crowd the halls. Young victims of gun violence take their turn alongside artists and small business owners who lack insurance. The ER waiting room serves as the grounding point for the film, capturing in vivid detail what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance. The film – using a blend of cinema verité and characters’ voiceover – offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices. The Waiting Rooms is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |