News and Events
This new film series features documentaries about human rights themes that were award winners at the annual FullFrame Documentary Film Festival. Exploring issues as diverse as voting rights, the right to die, the death penalty and access to education, these exceptional works of art move us even as they pose tough questions about whose rights are protected and why. The films are preserved in the Full Frame Archive of Duke University Libraries and compliment Duke's rich and expanding collection of human rights materials.
March 16, 2010:
“The Self-Made Man” (64 minutes)
From PBS' POV:
The idea of a "right to die," gaining force from medicine's ability to prolong life, regardless of its "quality," is a hot-button issue now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and several state legislatures. The Bush administration has challenged to Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, passed in 1994, allowing terminally ill patients to receive prescriptions for lethal drugs if doctors certify the patients are rational and within six months of death. Meanwhile, some terminally ill people continue to hasten their own deaths, or be helped by their loved ones, who sometimes face criminal penalties. Among those most likely to respond to debilitating illness with suicide are elderly white men — men like Bob Stern — who most expect to be in control of their lives.
The Self-Made Man is reality footage of a sane, successful man contemplating suicide, inter-cut with his family's memories of a life lived large right through the end. Bob Stern made up his own mind about the right to die, leaving his family and others to make up theirs. Is suicide, despite cultural and religious taboos, ever right? How do we weigh the benefits and costs, above all to the patient, of ever-more elaborate systems of medical life support? And even if the patient wants to kill himself, does he owe it to his loved ones to continue to live?" For full article go to POV .
Panel discussion to follow screening.
The film series is sponsored by the Archives for Human Rights, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Duke Human Rights Center and the Franklin Humanities Institute.March 16 at 7:00pm in the Rare Book Room of Perkins Library. Free and open to the public. Parking in the Bryan Center Parking Deck.
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