In Fighting for Life , filmmaker Terry Sanders begins by showing us USU, the Uniformed Services University, that trains doctors, nurses and medics that specialize in disaster and mass casualty situations as well as battlefield duty. The film begins in the educational institution with students working on cadavers and discussing the intensity level of their studies. These studies include a night time mass casualty drill in which fake victims are made up with gory, Hollywood-style wounds and injuries. The film also takes us on a field trip to the battle site of Antietam, the bloodiest U.S. battle. There a Civil War re-enactor explains how surgeons performed 8-10 procedures an hour and found that simply cutting off limbs increased the patient survival rate. One of the nurses explains that Matthew Brady photographed the wounded soldiers and this was the first time the public saw these kinds of images (images that still have the power to jolt viewers).
From this historical context, Sanders than moves on to show us contemporary medical officers in Iraq dealing with the injured. In the crapped, often makeshift field facilities severely injured soldiers are identified and flown to better equipped hospitals. The film focuses on some of these severely injured soldiers to show how new medical procedures and new technology are allowing doctors to save more lives. But this means that many soldiers - who might have dies from their wounds in earlier wars - are surviving but surviving with injuries that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
Fighting for Life (Truly Indy)
Sanders has created a kind of old school documentary. While Michael Moore makes himself a character on camera and a film like Chicago 10 employs flashy editing and animation, Sanders' Fighting for Life puts his subject and material front and center. Sanders is a filmmaker who steps back to let his material be the main attraction. That's something that many contemporary documentary makers are eschewing in favor of filmmaking styles that will grab more attention and provide greater entertainment. Sanders, on the other hand, is a dogged documentarian who goes out to collect as much footage as possible and then serve it up to us in an objective a manner as possible - although he concedes that documentaries cannot avoid a certain amount of subjectivity. The result is a film that initially doesn't impress you because of its low budget video look and straightforward simplicity. But it's a film that builds in power through its sheer persistence and accumulation of compelling material.
Sanders provides a rare glimpse into the world of the doctors and nurses tasked with saving lives in difficult circumstances. You cannot leave Fighting for Life without a deep sense of respect for the medical personnel and the patients.
Fighting for Life (unrated but contains occasional graphic surgery images) is a truly independent work, made for very little money and definitely outside the mainstream Hollywood film industry. Reflecting that indie spirit, Terry Sanders will be in San Diego on Friday March 28 at the Hillcrest Cinemas for the 7:30 and 10:00pm screenings of the film. Sanders spoke with me earlier this week about his film.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
How did
Fighting for Life
come about?
TERRY SANDERS:
It was brought to me by Tammy Alvarez who was the mother of this medical student at this school - USU, the Uniformed Services University - I had never heard of, and she said the school was under constant threat of closure by Congress. She thought that a film about it could help build a constituency for it and help prevent that so she came to me. It took awhile for me to get interested and it took a visit to the school and when I did visit it I found it was a very exceptional school and that's how it started as a rescue project for the school. But with the war in Iraq building and growing this became a three-year project. This odyssey into the world of military medicine.
Terry Sanders shooting his documentary Fighting for Life (Truly Indy)
BETH ACCOMANDO:
The film fans out in different directions, did the focus of the film change over the course of shooting the footage?
TERRY SANDERS:
It was like a had a tiger by the tail and the film was dragging me into areas that I really hadn't thought about. The original focus was on the school and activities like disaster response. But the war's really impacted these doctors and nurses. But I also thought it would be great to follow one person, one patient all the way through the system. But there was no way of knowing if I'd find the right person, this is reality filmmaking so you just have to be alert as to what comes by your lens. So the 21-year-old specialist that we followed from Balad, Iraq to Walter Reed and on to her partial recovery, she just came out of the heaven. Crystal was just an amazing person from the very beginning.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
There are some graphic shots of injuries and surgery, did you ever hesitate in using those images?
TERRY SANDERS:
I think the film is generally very restrained but some people do feel it is too impactful. I was constantly balancing the need to show blood - you don't have a war without showing blood - yet restraining it so it won't drive the audience out of the theater. I was very conscious of this balance showing just enough to underline the seriousness of not only the war but this young woman's injuries and there's one shot of her leg where her bone is exposed but that shot is calculated to impress the audience with the seriousness of her wounds but not go beyond that. I hate gore that is shoved in the audience's face. You have to be honest with the audience.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
There was a mass casualty simulation that was surprising because of the amount of work put into making the injuries look real.
TERRY SANDERS:
This school is unique in that it's like a double major it's a complete regular medical school and at the same time it specializes in disaster medicine including a situation where they simulate all sorts of exercises including a mass casualty at night. And the wounds that are simulated are all based on actual wounds, taken from photographs and they are all made to look very real. It showed what a mass casualty would be like and unfortunately will be like when it does happen. So there's no way to film a real one but this provided the closest thing.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
What surprised you or impressed you about USU?
TERRY SANDERS:
What first struck me was the maturity of the students and the focus, and the ideal of service over self that this was not a medical school where people were going to ultimately make a lot of money and drive a Mercedes but rather that they were here to learn and practice medicine, and the high ethical level on the part of the faculty and the students. They take the Hippocratic Oath on the first day of the freshman class and when they graduate, and that's all the way through and this school had an ethics class that's really good from the beginning of its inception back in 1972. So ethics and ideals and Hippocratic Oath is all very real.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
The film provided a different view of the war since these medical personnel are essentially neutral, they will help anyone in need.
TERRY SANDERS:
The doctors and nurses, the medical ethics involved, they will treat the so-called enemy combatants as well as American soldiers. What I saw was incredible skill and dedication and compassion, and with the wounded what I saw was incredible courage and dignity and the determination to bounce back and heal. The title of the film is of course Fighting for Life and it's about soldiers who fight for life, save life and limb and that's their focus. It's the other side of the war; it's the war after the war, the fight that begins when the battle ends as they say. So there's a real good feeling on the part of the medics, the doctors, the nurses that they are doing something important.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
Your film is very different from the kind of documentaries made by Michael Moore where the filmmaker's presence and point of view are made very clear.
TERRY SANDERS:
I did not want to go in there and make a polemic. This is a film that could be seen by right, left, center, whatever because it's not about the politics it's about the human experience. So I certainly didn't want to impose an editorial message on top of what you were seeing. I don't believe in a style, you don't put a style on a subject; you let the subject tell you how it wants to be made. The style of this was very much pure reality or as pure as you can get. I mean everything is subjective but I didn't want to bring in movie lights. The is, in our case, we had a crew of four, and our goal was to be invisible. And to be able to capture everything as it happens as it would happen if we weren't there. When you mentioned Michael Moore who I greatly admire but he makes a totally different film. The filmmaker is a character in his films and is in front of the camera, and I don't do that. Rightfully in his case it was polemic but in my case being non-partisan, avoiding a political argument was the whole point. It made it bullet proof against people saying it was propaganda because it isn't, it's about war, life, about people responding and it's about the wounded.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
There are some surprisingly intimate moments, as when you film a young Iraqi soldier who is informed that he will be paralyzed for the rest of his life.
TERRY SANDERS:
We filmed in a combat hospital in Balad and half the patients were Iraqis, both enemy combatant and Iraqi soldiers and this one Iraqi captain we were right there when he was told he would never walk again, he had been shot 12 times in spine, and he asked this young public affairs officer who was with us and acting as a volunteer, please kill me. Everything in this film surprised me. It stunned me that we would be in a position to record such a private moment.
BETH ACCOMANDO:
Now although you begin the film with the intent of highlighting the school, you did not make the film for USU.
TERRY SANDERS:
The funding for this is completely independent of the Defense Department and the school. It was mostly raised by this mother, Tammy Alvarez; she raised the money in bits and pieces.
Listen to the discussion abut Fighting for Life and Stop-Loss on These Days.
Companion viewing: M*A*S*H, No End in Sight, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision
