Heroes or madmen? If you ever wondered what kind of individual puts their life on hold to travel to some of the most wretched corners of the world to mend broken people, you’ll find your answer in Living in Emergency. This fascinating but slightly unfocused documentary follows four volunteers to Médecins Sans Frontières: two are coping with their first posting and two are veterans, with the thousand yard stare and 60-a-day cigarette habit to show for it.
Posted in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the doctors are frequently the first of their profession that the locals have seen in decades of strife and civil war. Theirs is a kind of gonzo medicine, improvised in desperate conditions, while trying to ignore the “smell of pus, the smell of your own panic”. This makes for gruelling viewing. We get an ad hoc amputation in the first few minutes and an emergency trepanning about halfway through. More disturbing than the gore, however, is the emotional and spiritual collateral damage of life in a war zone where everyone is a potential enemy. A little girl, treated for a gunshot wound, weeps helplessly for the parents she just saw slaughtered in front of her. The doctor, a veteran close to burning out from prolonged exposure to so much death, looks on, curiously detached. The tragedy of these men and women, the best and the bravest of their kind, is that none of them seem to emerge from their MSF experience unscathed. The human cost of their kind of high stakes altruism is dauntingly high.
15, 93mins