While the U.S. is busy killing millions of civilians in privatized oil wars in two countries, the French-based organization Médecins Sans Frontiéres (Doctors Without Borders) has been busy (since 1971) providing essential medical aid to people living in the most remote and war torn places on the earth.
Documentarian Mark Hopkins takes an open-eyed approach to following the stories of four vastly different MSF doctors testing the limits of their abilities to save lives in Congo and post-conflict Liberia. Italian toxicologist Dr. Chiara Lepora is a charismatic 26-year-old veteran MSF team leader with a gift for defusing the frustrations of doctors whose missions she oversees, like Dr. Davinder Gill whose remote jungle location has put him in a "Heart of Darkness" mindset.
Without even such elementary supplies as surgical gloves or gauze, it's easy to understand Dr. Gill's frustration as he presses a suffering patient's enormous hernia back into her belly under the dim light of a flashlight. The film makes no attempt to bestow heroic status on the very human doctors as they go about their demanding work, but rather show their decision-making process as it emanates from a humanitarian ethos that seems all but forgotten in the West.
"Living In Emergency" is predictably difficult to watch at times, for the medical procedures being performed, but the filmmaker economically uses such moments to contextualize the enormous mental, emotional, and physical demands being placed on these brave individuals.
"Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders" should be mandatory viewing in every high school around the world.
Not Rated. 93 mins.
