Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide - Dramas
Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside)
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Country of origin and year: Spain, 2004
Starring: Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda and Lola Dueñas
The life story of Spaniard Ramón Sampedro, who fought a 30-year campaign to win the right to end his life. The film explores Ramón's relationships with two women: Julia, a lawyer who supports his cause, and Rosa, a local woman who wants to convince him that life is worth living. Through the gift of his love, these two women are inspired to accomplish things they never previously thought possible. Despite his wish to die, Ramón taught everyone he encountered the meaning, value and preciousness of life. Though he could not move himself, he had an uncanny ability to move others.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369702/
You Don't Know Jack
Director: Barry Levinson
Country of origin and year: USA, 2010
Starring: Al Pacino, Brenda Vaccaro and John Goodman
Dr. Jack Kevorkian is single-minded about giving dying individuals the right to determine how their lives will end. He assembles a device allowing a person to initiate a three-chemical intravenous drip. Eventually, he is brought to trial when he defies Michigan law on assisting the suicide of terminally-ill persons. In court scenes, Kevorkian is sometimes antic. He wants the Supreme Court to rule. He picks a fight he cannot win: is it hubris or heroism?
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1132623/
Ich Klage an (I Accuse)
Director: Wolfgang Liebeneiner
Country of origin and year: Germany 1941
Starring: Heidemarie Hatheyer, Paul Hartmann, Mathias Weiman
This drama features the story of a talented woman who grows progressively disabled due to multiple sclerosis. Unable to bear the thought of being a burden on others, she begs for euthanasia before she is reduced to a mere fragment of her once-vital self. Her husband assists her suicide, to the accompaniment of sensitive piano music.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033750/
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
Director: Julian Schnabel
Country of origin and year: France, 2007
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner and Marie-Josée Croze
This film tells the true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
Director: John Badham
Country of origin and year: USA, 1981
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, John Cassavetes and Christine Lahti
Left a quadraplegic after an auto accident, the embittered Ken feels utterly useless, as both an artist and a human being. He does not want his family's love, or his doctor's care, or his nurse's ministrations. He simply wants to die-but this is impossible, given the legal state of things in the 1970s. Regardless, he continues to fight for the right to access euthanasia.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083326/
Tuesdays With Morrie
Director: Mick Jackson
Country of origin and year: USA, 1999
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Hank Azaria and Wendy Moniz
Detroit Free Press sports columnist Mitch Albom has found success and popularity in his occupation, but emotionally and spiritually he is bankrupt. While watching television one night, he comes across an episode of a news show and learns that his former university professor Morrie Schwartz is battling Lou Gehrig's Disease. At first, Mitch is reluctant to pay his former mentor a visit, since they did not keep in touch. Mitch eventually overcomes his uneasiness and, to his surprise, finds a very warm welcome from Morrie. The two begin to discuss the issues of happiness, life, and death, and they soon begin to meet on a weekly basis as Mitch reassumes the role of Morrie's student.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0207805/
Magnus
Director: Kadri Kõusaar
Country of origin and year: Latvia, 2007
Starring: Anu Aaremäe, Piret Avila and Hellar Bergmann
Magnus is a sensitive boy from a family where no-one really cares about him. As a child Magnus suffers from a potentially fatal lung disease and he plays bizarre games to cheat death. Ten years later, modern medicine has cured the disease but Magnus' death wish continues. After his second attempt to take his own life his father's conscience finally awakens. He tries to convince his son to go on living by sharing his own unorthodox lifestyle. An uneasy and sometimes humorous relationship develops between Magnus and his father, leading to an unexpected conclusion.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0979917/
Amos
Director Michael Tuchner
Country of origin and year: USA, 1985
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Montgomery and Dorothy McGuire
Amos is a fiercely independent senior-citizen baseball coach, forced to live in a retirement home after an auto accident. During his stay, Amos conducts a battle of wills with overbearing head nurse Daisy Dawes. This Cuckoo's Nest-derived setup has an added wrinkle: Amos suspects, quite rightly as it turns out, that Dawes has been systematically murdering her more troublesome charges.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088713/
The Barbarians Invasion (Les Invasions Barbares)
Director: Denys Arcand
Country of origin and year: Canada, 2003
Starring: Rémy Girard, Dorothée Berryman and Stéphane Rousseau
A revisiting, some 15 years later, of the principal characters of Denys Arcand's 1986 comedy drama film, "The Decline of the American Empire." Remy, now divorced and in his early fifties, is hospitalized. His ex-wife, Louise, asks their son Sebastien to come home from London where he now lives. Sebastien hesitates; he and his father have not had much to say to one another for years now. He relents, however, and flies to Montreal to help his mother and support his father. As soon as he arrives, Sebastien moves heaven and earth, brings his contacts into play and disrupts the system in every way possible to ease the ordeal that awaits Remy. Around his father's bedside, Sebastien also reunites the merry band of folk who were all players in Remy's complicated past: relatives, friends and former mistresses.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338135/
Freedom of Life
Director: Sharat Chandra
Country of origin and year: India, 2005
Starring: Anushka Shetty, Yatin Karyekar and Aniket Rudaraksh
Patty, an 8-year-old boy, has suffered from a serious road accident that has ruptured his spine beyond repair, leaving him no movement in his arms and legs. His sister Carol, a medical student, takes up the challenge to nurse Patty. But events take a wrong turn and their father decides to give euthanasia to his son even though it is illegal in India. Hope and belief in God ultimately helps their father stop the slide down the slippery slope.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0823660/
The Teenage Kevorkian
Director: Georgios K. Dermatis
Country of origin and year: USA, 2005
Starring: Paul Anninos, Jennifer Beam and Joan Beccaria
Tom and Jerry, Judge Judy's identical twins, were kidnapped by Jimmy the Pimp seeking revenge on his sentence. They were raised with no human contact in the desert by a teenage hooker, who abandoned them to die at age of ten. Tom was rejected by his real mother upon their return. He found refuge in the homeless society and mentored by a homeless vagrant. There they learned how to love and relieve pain forever.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450332/
Right to Die
Director: Paul Wendkos
Country of origin and year: USA, 1987
Starring: Raquel Welch, Michael Gross and Bonnie Bartlett
Emily Bauer is a successful psychologist with a happy home life until she is suddenly stricken with the dreaded neurological affliction ALS ("Lou Gehrig's Disease"). At first, she is determined to fight for her life, but as her condition deteriorates, eventually leaving her in a vegetative state, Ms. Welch begs her husband to help her die.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093862/
Le Temps Qui Reste (Time To Leave)
Director: Francois Ozon
Country of origin and year: France, 2005
Starring: Melvil Poupaud, Jeanne Moreau, Valerie Bruni Tedeschi
Romain is a successful fashion photographer with terminal cancer. He decides to die alone rather than prolong the inevitable with chemotherapy or have his loved ones smother him in sympathy, and instead tries to prepare his loved ones to live without him.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417189/
Logan's Run
Director Michael Anderson
Country of origin and year: USA 1976
Starring: Michael York, Jenny Agutter and Richard Jordan
In the year 2274, inhabitants are free to pursue all of the pleasures of life living in a city within an enclosed dome where is little or no work for humans to perform. There is one catch however: your life is limited and when you reach thirty, it is terminated. Logan and Francis are "sandmen," charged with tracking down and killing "runners" — those citizens who will submit to neither "renewal" (a peaceful death) nor "carousel" (a gladiatorial battle) when their time comes. When Logan grows intrigued by a beautiful young woman, Jessica, who plans to become a runner, he is forced to question the fundamental principles of his society.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
Kill Me Please
Director Olias Barco
Country of origin and year: Belgium 2010
Starring: Aurélien Recoing, Benoît Poelvoorde and Muriel Bersy
Dr. Kruger runs a chateau in a beautiful forest and offers to his guests the service of a private clinic where one can die in all peace, champagne glass to the hand. But in the private clinic of “ideal death”, nothing occurs as envisaged.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1728130/
Johnny Got His Gun
Director: Dalton Trumbo
Country of origin and year: USA,1971
Starring: Timothy Bottoms, Kathy Fields, Marsha Hunt
Joe Bonham a young American soldier hit by an artillery shell on the last day of World War I, is a quadruple amputee who has also lost his eyes, ears, mouth and nose. He remains conscious and able to reason, however, rendering him a prisoner in his own body. As he drifts between reality and fantasy, he remembers his old life with his family and girlfriend. Joe tries to communicate to his doctors, via Morse Code, and wishes for the Army to either put him in a glass coffin in a freak show as a demonstration of the horrors of war, or kill him.
Internet Movie Database webpage:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067277/
Million Dollar Baby
Director: Clint Eastwood
Country of origin and year: USA, 2004
Starring: Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman
Wanting to learn from the best, aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald wants Frankie Dunn to train her. At the outset, he flatly refuses saying he has no interest in training a girl. Maggie's rough around the edges, but shows a lot of grit in the ring and he eventually relents. Maggie not only proves to be the boxer he always dreamed of having under his wing, but a friend who fills the great void he's had in his life. Maggie's career skyrockets, but an accident in the ring leads her to ask Frankie for one last favour.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405159/
The Ballad of Narayama
Director: Shôhei Imamura
Country of origin and year: Japan, 1983
tarring: Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto, Tonpei Hidari
In a poor 19th century rural Japanese village, everyone who reaches the age of 70 has to climb a nearby mountain to die. If anyone should refuse he or she would disgrace their family. Old Orin is 69. This winter it is her turn to go to the mountain. But first she must make sure that her eldest son Tatsuhei finds a wife.
Internet Movie Database webpage:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084390/
Amour
Director: Michael Haneke
Country of origin and year: France, 2012
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
Georges and Anne are a couple of retired music teachers enjoying life in their eighties. However, Anne suddenly has a stroke at breakfast and their lives are never the same. That incident begins Anne's harrowingly steep physical and mental decline as Georges attempts to care for her at home as she wishes. The couple's hopes for some dignity prove a dispiriting struggle even as their daughter enters the conflict. In the end, George, with his love fighting against his own weariness and diminished future on top of Anne's, is driven to make some critical decisions for them both.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1602620/
A Short Stay in Switzerland
Director: Simon Curtis
Country of origin and year: UK, 2009
Starring: Julie Walters, Stephen Campbell Moore, Lyndsey Marshal
After nursing her husband through the last throes of a hideous, debilitating disease, a woman doctor learns that she has a similar illness herself. She determines to die on her own terms, but first, she must convince her three grown children that the time is approaching for them to let her go. She and her children must travel in secret to an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland due to the harsh laws against such suicides of choice in the U.K. itself.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1273813/
Clara’s End (Clara s'en va morir)
Director: Virginie Wagon
Country of origin and year: France, 2010
Starring: Jeanne Balibar, Alexandre Tacchino, Caroline Torlois
A well-known actress discovers she has cancer and only a few months left to live. She decides to prepare for her death and contacts a clinic in Switzerland that performs assisted suicides. At first, she doesn’t tell anyone about her decision, including her teenage son because she wants to act in a new theatre play. Can she convince her friends and family to accept her decision?
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2313203/
The Farewell Party
Director: Tal Granit, Sharon Maymon
Country of origin and year: Israel, Germany, 2014
Starring: Ze’ev Revach, Levana Finkelstein, Aliza Rosen
The Farewell Party is a dark comedy about a group of Jerusalem retirement-home residents who create a euthanasia machine to put a terminally ill friend out of his misery. When rumors of the machine begin to spread, they face a moral dilemma as others come seeking the same service.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3163304/
Inherit the Wind
Director: Stanley Kramer
Country of origin and year: USA, 1960
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly
Inherit the Wind is set in the little town of Hillsboro when Bertram Cates a biology teacher, was thrown into prison for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution instead of creationism. Drawing intense national attention in the media with writer E. K. Hornbeck reporting, two of the nation's leading lawyers go head-to-head: Matthew Harrison Brady for the prosecution, and Henry Drummond for the defense.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053946/
Winter Roses (Des Roses en Hiver)
Director: Lorenzo Gabriele
Country of origin and year: France 2015
Starring: Mylène Demongeot, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Léa Drucker
Jean, the father of a family, decides to stop treatment for an incurable disease and access euthanasia to end his life. He and his wife announce the news to their three children, each of whom responds in a very different way.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3432260/
A Few Hours of Spring "Quelques heures de printemps"
Director: Stéphane Brizé
Country of origin and year: France, 2012
Starring: Vincent Lindon, Hélène Vincent, Emmanuelle Seigner
Alain Evrard, a trucker who has just finished serving a prison sentence, is forced to temporarily move back to his mother's house. This forced co-habitation causes all the violence of their past relationship to re-emerge. One day, Alain accidentally discovers that his mother has a brain tumor and that she has decided to shorten her suffering by resorting to assisted suicide in Switzerland.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899270/
Me Before You
Director: Thea Sharrock
Country of origin and year: UK, USA, 2016
Starring: Emilia Clarke, Sam Claffin, Janet McTear
Young and quirky Louisa Clark moves from one job to the next to help her family make ends meet. Her cheerful attitude is put to the test when she becomes a caregiver for Will Traynor, a wealthy young banker left paralyzed from an accident two years earlier. As the story progresses, Clark falls in love with Traynor, but Traynor has decided that death is better than living with a disability and arranges to travel to Switzerland die by euthanasia.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2674426/
Zurich (J’irai Mourir Demain)
Director: Frederik Steiner
Country of origin and year: Germany, 2013
Starring: Liv Lisa Fries, Lena Stolze, Sophie Rogal
After years of suffering from cystic fibrosis, 22-year old Lea has reached the terminal stage of her illness and assisted suicide seems to be her only solution. She travels to Zurich and wants to spend her very last day, her 23rd birthday, with her family, although only her grandmother knows that she has chosen that day to end her life. At her hotel, Lea meets somewhat strange but likable Moritz, who has come to Zurich for the same reason. In Zurich, parallel words collide: Lea is determined but encounters fierce resistance from her own inner circle of loved ones.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3229936/
The Last Companion (Short)
Director: Lin Li
Country of origin and year: UK, 2019
Starring: Pene Herman-Smith
A British national recounts her experience of having accompanied a stranger, Jill, another Briton, to go to Switzerland to die. Because of her ill health and disabilities, Jill chose to terminate her own life with the help of lifecircle in Basel. Although Jill was able to travel to Switzerland on her own, she was required to have a companion who could identify her body after she died. As she was unable to find a family member or friend willing to do so, lifecircle approached Anna for help because she had been known to them before.
http://linli-art.com/the-last-companion
Everything Went Fine (Tout S'Est Bien Passé)
Director: François Ozon
Country of origin and year:
Starring: Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas
An elderly man with a murky past, estranged from his wife, has a disabling stroke. He is regularly visited by his daughter Emmanuelle, and he asks her to arrange for him to go to Switzerland for euthanasia. This rattles her, but eventually she agrees to take him to a suicide clinic in Switzerland.
Internet Movie Database webpage:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12847812/