Research Seminar at Lisbon ERC Film and Death Project

This talk examines three French documentaries—Les yeux ouverts (Frédéric Chaudier, 2010), Une maison au bord du monde (Pascal Cesaro, 2018), and Les Equilibristes (Perrine Michel, 2020)—to explore how these films engage with palliative care, a medical field that has, since Cicely Saunders’s foundational work in the 1970s, become the primary approach to confronting death in medicine. By engaging with conceptual questions surrounding auto-documentary, care ethnographies, and vulnerability, this analysis untangles how documentary filmmaking’s ethics intersect with care ethics in the specific institutional contexts and caring practices depicted. Highlighting the films as a commentary on societal engagements with dying, which fluctuate between idealization and critique of palliative philosophy, this talk considers the end-of-life documentary as an act of relational co-creation. In this sense, filmmaking not only aligns with Saunders’s holistic vision of pain and care but also traces its limitations, especially in light of current political debates on end-of-life care in France.