Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Living in Emergency

Just got home from watching the final doc from the Doc Soup series (mental note - next year I need to actually know about this before the last doc is screened).
Anyway, the film was Living in Emergency.
It's a documentary about Medicens sans Frontieres and follows a couple MSF veterans and first mission doctors in Congo and Liberia. Other than that, I really can't go into more details because there's just SO much. SO much.
The film itself was okay. I mean, the cinematography and stuff was okay. I was a little disconcerted with the quality of the sound. I think I'm pretty good at deciphering accents, but there was some dialogue in the film that I couldn't really figure out. Perhaps more subtitling or something? I don't know if it was the sound system or the production itself, but I found some of the voices to be a bit muffled. As MSF has French roots, there was some French dialogue which I was lucky enough to understand, but there were some subtitles missing in these parts and I believe making sure that everyone understood the dialogue, the film would have been even stronger. Other than that, I didn't have any major problems.
The characters that were highlighted and the issues that were examined. Incredible. It was a powerful and emotional piece. All I can say is, hats of to all those who are part of the MSF organization or are somehow working with them. I have a deeper appreciation of you all.
Although I love what I do and I haven't even gotten to where I think I'm going yet, I still wonder if there's more out there that I'm meant to do.
Anyway, wow. I obviously loved this film.

In true doc festival spirit (Hot Docs is coming up!), there was a Q&A with Director, Mark Hopkins. No groundbreaking revelations from the chat, but I always appreciate directors taking the time out to attend screenings and speak with the audience.

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