Fighting For Life
Fighting For Life is directed and produced by two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Terry Sanders. The movie premiered in New York City on 5 October and is set for nationwide release this Spring.
Fighting For Life is a feature documentary dedicated to U.S. medical personnel and covers 21 year-old Army Specialist Crystal Davis as she moves from Iraq to Germany, to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC, while at the same struggling to recover the loss of her left leg. The film tells and shows student life of the Uniformed Services University (USU); how they obtain their degrees, and how they are prepared to work alongside U.S. soldiers in active combat.
The film uses footage from the war in Iraq and has compelling interviews with medical personnel. The doctors and nurses say that nobody wants a war and that they don’t want to see people losing their lives for nothing and because of nothing.
The New York Times reports that some of the images in the movie are from the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War, a conflict that has given a rise to the present “battlefield surgery.”
Interviews with doctors, nurses and troops show that the stress involved in caring for wounded fighters is nothing compared with the stress of being one. Embedded shrapnel; bullet wounds; severe burns; sheared-off fingers, arms and legs: Mr. Sanders and his crew observe these sights with a medic’s mix of empathy and dispassion. But some circumstances are appalling enough to melt even hard hearts: a 3-year-old Iraqi boy whose extremities were blasted off; an Iraqi captain made a paraplegic in a firefight, begging his caregivers to kill him; reports of wives’ calling hospitals long distance to ask if their wounded husbands will be able to father children again.
According to National Movies, if Fighting For Life is a propaganda piece, then it is the best of its kind as largely avoids “editorialization and instead focus[es] on simple human drama.”
Sanders follows his characters with a mixture of clinical frankness and deep sensitivity, finally creating an unsettling yet unforgettable portrait of sacrifice and courage — from a badly burned Iraqi toddler to a courageous Army specialist who loses her leg in Iraq and begins to reclaim her life at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. “Fighting for Life” is essential viewing at a time when, five years on, the war’s human cost is still too often mired in partisan rhetoric and administration spin.
Fighting For Life can make any American feel proud of the dedication their country’s medical personnel possess, but it can also make any person inspired that in this corner of the world, there are dedicated people who take care of men and women putting their own lives into danger.
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