The Waiting Room is often dryly funny; it's very tense at times; it's emotional, and it's not didactic, which it easily could have been. It's frustrating, to be sure, but that's sort of the point.
Any one of us can find ourselves stuck in a public hospital waiting room tomorrow. We want people to keep this in the forefront of what has become a series of ideological arguments and debates. People stuck in the waiting rooms have no voice in this conversation at all. Through this film and the interactive project, we want to bring them to the conversation. It is an ongoing conversation, this thing won’t be solved tomorrow.
Film & Media Studies Visiting Filmmakers Series presents The Waiting Room and filmmaker Peter Nicks at the Johnson Center Cinema on Wed, Nov 7th 2012, at 6pm.
The discussion following the screening will be moderated by Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday.
Sponsored by the Film & Media Studies Program at George Mason University, this event is free and open to the public.
The Waiting Room is an immersive documentary that shows what happens at the Emergency Room at Oakland's Highland Hospital. The filmmakers were granted unprecedented access to this "safety-net" facility, which is fighting for survival during the ongoing economic downturn. Stretched to the breaking point, the Highland is the primary care facility for 250,000 people of nearly every nationality, race, and religion, with 250 patients -- most of them uninsured -- crowding into its ER every day. Through verite footage and interviews, the film offers a raw, intimate, and often uplifting look at how patients, staff, and caregivers cope with disease, bureacracy, frustration, hope, and hard choices during a typically hectic day.
We are fortunate to be hosting The Waiting Room and Pete Nicks, who attended Howard University as an undergraduate, to GMU. The film has won awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Full Frame Documentary Festival. It screened at this year's Silverdocs Documentary Festival in Silver Spring and the True/False Film Festival, and was selected by Hot Docs. This October, it won the Harrel Award for Best Film at the Camden International Film Festival.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Peter Nicks and Ann Hornaday. We look forward to a lively discussion of health care in the US, race, gender, class politics, filmmaking, and the evolving stakes of documentary and journalism.
This event is co-sponsored by African and African American Studies; Communication; Cultural Studies; English; Film & Video Studies; Global and Community Health; Nutrition and Food Studies; Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Multicultural Education; School of Nursing; and University Life.
For more information, please contact Cynthia Fuchs at cfuchs@gmu.edu