Logline
As our population ages, millions of Americans are living longer with serious illness, but are served by a medical system that prioritizes expensive and often unnecessary procedures, often at the expense of patient quality of life. Combining emotionally engaging personal stories, hand-drawn animation, and an intellectually complex discussion of the current crisis in health care, Do No Harm will help prompt necessary dialogue about the very nature of American medicine.
Synopsis
American health care is expensive, inefficient, delivered inequitably, and often ignores the basic needs of patients and families. As our population ages, millions of Americans are living longer with serious illness, but are served by a medical system that prioritizes expensive and often unnecessary procedures, often at the expense of patient quality of life. During the current debate over health care policy, Do No Harm presents intimate portraits of doctors and patients in the emerging field of palliative medicine, offering a vision of care built around supporting the needs and wishes of patients and their families.
Our central characters are three idealistic, young medical fellows who we follow during their training, and through whom we meet a cast of compelling, courageous patients and their families. Cinema verité scenes with these doctors and patients, filmed over two years in one New York City hospital with extraordinary, unlimited access, are combined with an intellectually complex discussion of the current crisis in health care, together with hand-drawn animation crafted by the Academy Award-winning animator John Canemaker. Filmmaker Peggy Stern’s personal account of her own medical journey is interwoven into the narrative through incisive, and sometimes funny, first-person voiceover, offering insight into the complex – and broken – world of American health care, and stories of those who are seeking to fix it.
PEGGY STERN (producer/director) is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark films include THE MOON AND THE SON: AN IMAGINED CONVERSATION, CHUCK JONES: MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD, and STEPHANIE.
PETER MILLER (producer/director) is a documentary filmmaker whose acclaimed films include AKA DOC POMUS, A CLASS APART, JEWS AND BASEBALL, and SACCO AND VANZETTI. He has also been a producer on numerous PBS documentaries by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, including JAZZ and THE WAR.