Human Dignity - Full Moral Status - Dramas
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Director: Steven Spielberg
Country of origin and year: USA, 2001
Starring: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law and Frances O'Connor
A robotic boy, the first programmed to love, David is adopted as a test case by a Cybertronics employee and his wife. Though he gradually becomes their child, a series of unexpected circumstances make this life impossible for David. Without final acceptance by humans or machines, David embarks on a journey to discover where he truly belongs, uncovering a world in which the line between robot and machine is both vast and profoundly thin.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/
The Elephant Man
Director: David Lynch
Country of origin and year: USA, UK, 1980
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt and Anne Bancroft
John Merrick, the hideously deformed 19th century Londoner known as "The Elephant Man" is treated as a sideshow freak. Merrick is assumed to be retarded as well as misshapen because of his inability to speak coherently. In fact, he is highly intelligent and sensitive, a fact made public when one Dr. Frederick Treves rescues Merrick from a carnival and brings him to a hospital for analysis. Alas, even after being recognized as a man of advanced intellect, Merrick is still treated like a freak; no matter his station in life, he will forever be a prisoner of his own malformed body.
Internet Movie Database webpage:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080678/
I, Robot
Director: Alex Proyas
Country of origin and year: USA, Germany, 2004
Starring: Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan and Bruce Greenwood
Set in a future Earth (2035 A.D.) where robots are common assistants and workers for their human owners. Chicago Police Detective Del Spooner's investigates the murder of Dr. Alfred Lanning, in which a robot, Sonny , appears to be implicated. This raises many questions. Does it mean that robots can now compete against human beings? But this may also signify that robots should be respected for their inherent dignity. Aiding Spooner in his investigation is a psychologist, Dr. Susan Calvin, who specializes in the psyches of robots.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/
Shooting Dogs – UK (Beyond the Gates – USA)
Director: Michael Caton-Jones
Country of origin and year: UK, Germany, 2005
Starring: John Hurt, Hugh Dancy and Dominique Horwitz
In April 1994, after the airplane of the Hutu President of Rwanda is shot down, the Hutu militias slaughter the Tutsi population. In the Ecole Technique Officielle, the Catholic priest Christopher and the idealistic English teacher Joe Connor lodge two thousand and five hundred Rwandans refugees, under the protection of the Belgian UN force and under siege by Hutu militia. When the Tutsi refugees are abandoned by the UN, they are butchered by the extremist militia.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420901/
Bicentennial Man
Director: Chris Columbus
Country of origin and year: USA, 1999
Starring: Robin Williams, Embeth Davidtz and Sam Neill
The Martin family purchases a domestic android as a servant and names him Andrew. Andrew comes to know the man of the house as Sir, his wife as Ma'am, and their daughter as Portia; before long, the Martins suspect that they do not have an ordinary robot on their hands. Andrew seems capable of expressing emotion and generating original thoughts, and the longer he stays with the Martins, the more strongly these human traits manifest themselves. Over the next 200 years, Andrew becomes less a machine and more a member of the family, until a mechanic tells Andrew that he might be able to turn him into a human being.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182789/
Wit
Director: Mike Nichols
Country of origin and year: USA, 2001
Starring: Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Audra McDonald
Vivian Bearing is a professor of English literature whose life takes a turn when she is diagnosed with metastatic Stage IV ovarian cancer. As she undergoes various chemotherapy treatments to treat her disease and she suffers through the various side-effects, she attempts to put everything in perspective. The story flashes back to previous moments in her life, including her childhood, her graduate school studies, and her career prior to her diagnosis. As she grows increasingly ill, Vivian agrees to undergo more tests and experimental treatments, even though she realizes the doctors treating her, see her less as someone to save and more as a guinea pig for their treatments. The only person who seems to care for her as a person is Susie Monahan one of the nurses on the staff.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243664/
The Doctor
Director: Randa Haines
Country of origin and year: USA, 1991
Starring: William Hurt, Christine Lahti and Elizabeth Perkins
Jack McKee is a gifted but arrogant surgeon who cares little about the emotional welfare of his patients and is little more than a benign stranger to his wife Anne and his son Nicky. When Jack discovers that he has a malignant tumor in his throat that could rob him of the ability to speak, or even kill him, he suddenly becomes a patient instead of a doctor. He learns first-hand about the long stretches in the waiting room, the indignity of filling out pointless forms, and the callous attitude of the professional medical community. Restored to health, Jack is determined to be a more caring healer and strives to be a better husband and father, but his new lease on life also brings some tensions with a fellow surgeon.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101746/
Life As A Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (OriginaL title: Zycie Jako Smiertelna Choroba Przenoszona Droga Plciowa)
Director: Krzysztof Zanussi
Country of origin and year: Poland, 2000
Starring: Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Krystyna Janda and Tadeusz Bradecki
The title of this film — taken from graffiti on a wall near director Krzysztof Zanussi's home — provides ironic commentary on its subject, which revolves around a doctor's questioning of his beliefs when he is confronted with terminal illness. Tomasz is first seen working as the doctor on the set of a French movie production about the life of Saint Bernard. After his work is finished, he returns to Warsaw, where he makes the unpleasant discovery that he has cancer. Tomasz' only hope is an expensive operation in Paris, and he is forced to ask his ex-wife Anna (Krystyna Janda) — now remarried to a self-important yuppie — for money. Anna writes him a check, but when he goes to Paris for the operation, Tomasz is informed that his condition has become inoperable. Facing imminent death, he begins to question the beliefs he has held all his life and, with a sense of fatalistic liberation, starts to experiment with both his own life and those of others.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257289/
The Stepford Wives
Director: Bryan Forbes
Country of origin and year: USA, 1975
Starring: Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss and Peter Masterson
Ira Levin's savagely satiric sci-fi novel The Stepford Wives provided fodder for one of the biggest moneymaking films of the 1970s. Joanna (Katharine Ross) moves with husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and their children to the "ideal" suburban community of Stepford, Connecticut. Slowly (perhaps too slowly) Joanna deduces that something is amiss; most of the other housewives are vapid creatures who speak in trivialities and live only to please their husbands. Together with new friend Bobby (Paula Prentiss), she investigates this curious status quo. When Bobby also succumbs to sickly sweetness, Joanna discovers that Stepford's husbands have conspired with male chauvinist scientists to replace all the wives with computerized android duplicates. The final closeup is a gem of compact horror and black comedy.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073747/
The Wild Child (L’enfant Sauvage)
Director: François Truffaut
Country of origin and year: France, 1970
Starring: François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Cargol and Françoise Seigner
This true story is based in the year 1798. In a forest, some countrymen catch a wild child who cannot walk, speak, read or write. The Doctor Itard is interested in the child, and starts to educate him. Everybody thinks he will fail, but with a lot of love and patience, he manages to obtain results.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064285/
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/
Normal
Director: Carl Bessai
Country of origin and year: Canada, 2007
Starring: Carrie- Anne Moss, Kevin Zegers, Callum Keith Rennie
A deadly car accident brings together a group of previously unrelated people, each of whom is forced to deal with the emotional fallout.
Miss Evers' Boys
Director: Joseph Sargent
Country of origin and year: USA, 1997
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Alfre Woodard, Von Coulter
Duration: 118 min
In 1932 Macon County, Alabama, the federal government launched into a medical study called The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Blacks with Syphilis. The study selected 412 men infected with the disease and faked long-term treatment, while really only giving them placebos and liniments. The premise of the action was to determine if blacks reacted similar to whites to the overall effects of the disease. When the experiment was discontinued 40 years later, only 127 of the original study group were left alive. The story is told from the point of view of Nurse Eunice Evers, who was well aware of the lack of treatment being offered, but felt her role was to console the involved men, many of whom were her direct friends.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119679/