SDH Captioned
Grades 10 -12, College, Adults
Directed by Peter Nicks
Produced by Linda Davis, Peter Nicks, William B. Hirsch
DVD Purchase $295, Rent $95
US Release Date: 2013
Copyright Date: 2012
DVD ISBN: 1-93777-249-7
Subjects
African-American Studies
American Studies
Anthropology
Economics
Ethics
Film Studies
Health
Human Rights
Medicine
Political Science
Poverty
Social Justice
Social Psychology
Sociology
Awards and Festivals
Shortlist Best Documentary, Academy Awards®
Best Documentary, San Francisco Film Critics Circle
Audience Award, Golden Gate Award & Best Bay Area Documentary, San Francisco International Film Festival
Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Special Jury Mention, AFI/Discovery Channel, Silverdocs
Truer Than Fiction Award & Nominee for Best Documentary, Independent Spirit Awards
Best Documentary Nominee, Gotham Independent Film Awards
Special Jury Mention, Ashland Independent Film Festival
Best Debut Feature Nominee, Cinema Eye Honors
Best Documentary, Camden International Film Festival
Best Bay Area Documentary, SF Weekly
HotDocs, Canadian International Documentary Film Festival
True/False Film Fest
A day in the life of a public hospital's ER waiting room captures what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance.
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"A source of both inspiration and hope. The system may be broken, but the people are not." Andrew O'Hehir, Salon |
Note: There are two versions of this program on the same DVD: 82-minutes and 62-minutes.
The Waiting Room 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. 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 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. We witness the minute-by-minute Sisyphean struggle that plagues public hospitals, where emergency rooms have to field the overwhelming health care needs of the inner city. Young victims of gun violence take their turn alongside artists and small business owners who lack insurance. 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.
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. It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans.
Reviews
"An excellent, riveting documentary, revealing the raw compassion of health care providers trying their best to deliver care in a broken safety-net system. The Waiting Room offers a glimpse into the struggles of patients who are terrified about not only the crisis that brought them into the emergency department, but how they are going to pay for the care once they leave."
Dr. Karoline Mortensen, Assistant Professor of Health Services Administration, University of Maryland
"Public hospital emergency departments are the `safety net' of a fragmented and dysfunctional U.S. health care system. The Waiting Room depicts the experiences of people with severe and chronic illnesses who have no other options for care, and of the health care providers who are overwhelmed by the volume and acuity of patients seeking help. This film may inform health policy debates by illustrating the human aspects of seeking safety-net care."
Dr. Benjamin Sun, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University
"Of all the memorable films on offer at Silverdocs, the most haunting by far is The Waiting Room...Engrossing...As The Waiting Room makes clear...the lines between wealth and poverty keep shifting, virtually before our eyes."
Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
"Introduces you to some remarkable characters and also makes some terrifying points about the use of emergency care as a substitute for - or a consequence of the lack of - proper primary care."
Linda Holmes, National Public Radio
"Peter Nicks had extraordinary access to the people in and around the waiting room of a public hospital in Oakland. But what makes this a classic, and a work of art and not journalism, is his taste, his poetic touches, and his talent for understatement."
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
"The Waiting Room is, by virtue of the experiences it documents, an irrefutable argument for the necessity of universal health care, here and now. The movie depicts real human beings, every one of them deserving better than what they get...In a year of exceptionally strong documentaries, The Waiting Room is one of the most urgent and effective."
Amy Taubin, Artforum International Magazine
"As nail-biting as any Hollywood thriller...riveting...Shows us why our country's health care system is very much in tatters."
Tribeca Film Institute
"A rare fly-on-the-wall look inside an overwhelmed and at times overwhelming system and its impact on patients and staff."
Jeffrey Brown, PBS News Hour
"Cutting across race, culture, and class, the film inhabits a remarkably broad cross-section of American urban life...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. When strings swell up for the first time in the film's final moments, it's a catharsis that's well-earned."
Ryan Little, Washington City Paper
"A rock-solid verite docu...Its clear-eyed, well-crafted observation makes it plain Americans deserve a better system than this."
Dennis Harvey, Variety
"Astounding and moving...The cinema verite realism hits home, remaining personal while hinting at broad structural deficiencies (and strengths, by the way) in the nation's health care system. This movie will stay with you."
G. Allen Johnson, SF Gate
"The Waiting Room does two wonderful things...It takes a tedious situation and fills it with human emotion and real heart...The second, and perhaps most wonderful detail of the film, is the way it leaves the audience with a measure of hope...The hope comes from the people who continue to be there for us when we need them most. People who come back day after day with a positive attitude, and work tirelessly to help us."
Ryan McNeil, The Matinee
"When you see The Waiting Room, you are made aware that rationing is already at work, whether the illness is cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, drunkenness, or kidney disease...This is documentary as distilled observation. It's also as strong an argument for universal health care that I've seen in years."
David D'Arcy, Indiewire
"The film's intimate perspective, that of people who have nowhere else to go, brings a seemingly intractable political problem to the social level, rendering it a human problem."
Elien Becque, HealthCetera blog, Center for Health Media and Policy at Hunter College
"Everyone would be able to relate to this movie. Not everyone will relate to having no healthcare coverage, but everyone can understand what it is like to feel powerless for a child's health, or fearful for one's own life. This movie reaches the core of the human experience: life and death."
Brooke Shunatona, Vox Magazine, The Missourian
"[A] well-done depiction of why our health care system is so expensive and still produces lousy outcomes."
Bob Geary, Independent Weekly
"By turning his lens on the faces of the frustrated potential patients and the harried doctors and nurses who do their best with the resources they have, Nicks is able to make a simple, graceful point that so many political pundits and politicians have been arguing over for years: the healthcare system in the US is broken and many, many citizens are paying the price, sometimes with their lives."
Kristal Cooper, Toronto Film Scene
"The Waiting Room underscores with tender humanity one of the more expensive failures of our swiss-cheese health-care system: ERs have replaced preventive-care, chronic- care and primary-care physicians as the first (and only) stop for medical attention for too many Americans."
Lisa Kennedy, The Denver Post
"An engrossing documentary...A cautionary tale about the risk of allowing profit to take precedence over human suffering."
Bruce DeMara, Toronto Star
"The film is a real reveal about America's great health divide: the haves and have nots."
Jennifer Merin, About.com
"The cross section of life that drifts in and out is specific to the Bay Area's utopia in one sense - every race you can imagine seeking help and providing it...But that diversity is an indication of how, ideally, the so-called social safety net catches us all...Nicks isn't lobbying. He's storytelling. The aggregation of those stories becomes its own editorial."
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
"For hard-edged documentary snap with the all-important local angle, it would be hard to beat this film...Completely absorbing...Recommended."
Kelly Vance, East Bay Express
"A highly insightful experience, one that's simple and powerful...Tap[s] into the heart and soul of what's so critically at stake."
Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News