Intensive life unit
PerSo Award

Director’s Statement

I started filming after a personal experience of my own when my friend’s sister was dying in hospital and, sadly, things didn’t turn out well. Nobody received any information from the doctors about what was happening, the family was floating on a cloud of uncertainty and never had the opportunity to come to terms with the inevitable. Over time I began to feel a sense of injustice and undefined rage, which arose from the question, how was it possible not to manage this better? I was very aware that death, just like childbirth, is an integral part of human life and that our departure should take place in a dignified manner. Satisfactory conditions should be established for this to happen. Given that 80% of the Czech population currently die in hospitals (the numbers are comparable across the Western world), it is even more essential to make changes and restore humanity to the hospital and to lines of communication. In my mind, the main protagonists, Ondřej and Kateřina, are the bearers of this resolve and desire for change.

Initially, I wanted to set out by criticising the system and the social setting. What does it say about our developed society when we can connect dozens of tubes to a person, pharmaceutical companies can develop and market hundreds of new drugs, we rely on medicine as never before, but, despite all this, we abandon our human values? A number of questions and images came to mind. I was spurred on by my personal experience with my friend’s sister, which began to turn into a desire to work back, “decipher” and understand the circumstances, ideally to ensure that more and more families would not end up in a similar situation. The fact that most of society dies in hospital and that surviving families are often severely traumatised does not seem right to me. I wanted to know the answers to questions beginning with “how” and “why”?!

The most important question about the film soon became clear: How to make a film that would thematise the problem and be revealing, without being pathetic? A film I myself would like to go and see in the cinema. Fortunately, two doctors with great insight, erudition, energy and, above all, a desire to change the status quo – the founders of a new palliative care team at the General University Hospital, now the Clinic of Palliative Medicine, Ondřej Kopecký and Kateřina Rusinová, crossed my path and helped me.”