Film & Video

Dr. Frederick Covington
(October 11, 2019)
Runtime: 3min 57sec

This YouTube video provides a brief overview of occupational therapy's important role in palliative and hospice care - and is one of few video resources for OT practitioners. Topics include activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), leisure participation, rest and sleep, and psychosocial and behavioral health.

Note. Video does not have subtitles or closed captioning.

CAPC Palliative
(February 19, 2013)
Runtime: 5min 52sec

"Dr. Diane E. Meier is Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), a national organization devoted to increasing the number and quality of palliative care programs in the United States. In this video, Dr. Meier discusses 10 important steps in palliative care from over a decade of research. This video will serve as a valuable training tool and guide for medical professionals and their families."
(excerpt from YouTube.com)

Speaker: BJ Miller
TED Talks
(September 30, 2015)
Runtime: 19min 07sec

"At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? For many, it's simply comfort, respect, love. BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative medicine physician who thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients... Using empathy and a clear-eyed view of mortality, BJ Miller shines a light on health care's most ignored facet: preparing for death."
(excerpt from TED.com)

Speaker: Elaine Fong
TED Talks
(March 29, 2021)
Runtime: 21min 13sec

"After a terminal cancer diagnosis upended 12 years of remission, all Elaine Fong's mother wanted was a peaceful end of life. What she received instead became a fight for the right to decide when. Fong shares the heart-rending journey to honor her mother's choice for a death with dignity -- and reflects on the need to explore our relationship to dying so that we may redesign this final and most universal of human experiences."
(excerpt from TED.com)

Serious Illness Conversations
(2020 - Present)
Runtime: varies by video

The Reflections 2020 series, part of Serious Illness Conversations, facilitates conversations about race and inequities in end-of-life care, providing detailed references and links to all resources. "Using videos from a variety of sources, [Terry Altilio, Anne Kelemen, and Vickie Leff] get together and discuss the content, hoping to deepen the conversation, and inform our practice."
(excerpt from SeriousIllnessConversations.org)

Telling Pictures
(2018)
Runtime: 40min

End Game explores perceptions of life and death in the U.S. and its healthcare system through the lenses of patients, their families, and medical practitioners. "Facing an inevitable outcome, terminally ill patients meet extraordinary medical practitioners seeking to change our approach to life and death."
(excerpt from Netflix.com)

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
(April 21, 2011)
Runtime: 57min 55sec

"In My Time of Dying explores the way we approach the end of life in America. Medical experts and spiritual leaders are woven together with intimate portraits of people facing imminent death. The result is a unique and important conversation about how we meet death, how we support our loved ones in their time of dying, how we cultivate hope in these times, and how to engage in conversations."
(excerpt from PBS.org)

Clearcut Productions
(2011)
Runtime: 1hr 47min

How to Die in Oregon is centered around Oregon's 1997 Death with Dignity Act. Filmmaker "Peter Richardson gently enters the lives of the terminally ill as they consider whether – and when – to end their lives by lethal overdose. Richardson examines both sides of this complex, emotionally charged issue. What emerges is a life-affirming, staggeringly powerful portrait of what it means to die with dignity."
(excerpt from How to Die in Oregon official website)

f/8 Filmworks
(2016)
Runtime: 24min

In Extremis, "witness the wrenching emotions that accompany end-of-life decisions as doctors, patients and families in a hospital ICU face harrowing choices." This brief film highlights the challenges of hospital-based care at the end of life, making decisions on behalf of a loved one (and navigating family dynamics), and providing care that does not align with one's professional opinion but honors the patient and their family.
(excerpt from Netflix.com)

Big Mouth Productions
(2020)
Runtime: 1hr 30min

Dick Johnson Is Dead is a "darkly funny and wildly imaginative... love letter from a daughter to a father." Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson documents her shared experience with her father, Richard, as they navigate his dementia diagnosis and the disease's progression. Together, the duo "[stage] inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at pain and keep her father alive forever."
(excerpts from YouTube.com)

Caitlin Doughty
YouTube video series
(2011 - Present)
Runtime: Varies by video

Mortician, green death advocate, and funeral industry reformer, Caitlin Doughty, uses her expertise and dark humor to address a wide range of topics related to death. Doughty uses this YouTube series to debunk myths about death, normalize the unknowable, answer our strange and morbid questions, and advocate for our right to choose how we die and what happens to our bodies after we die.

Satori Seven Productions
(2017)
Runtime: 44min 54sec

"Living and Dying: A Love Story is an intimate family film by Sher and Rob Safran, documenting the last week of Sher’s parents’ life... [after] both [were] diagnosed with six months or fewer to live. Longtime supporters of the right-to-die movement, Charlie and Francie have chosen to use the State of Oregon’s Death with Dignity option — together."
(excerpt from Share Wisdom Network website)