End Game

Over the years, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have made documentaries usually focusing on LGBT topics (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet, State of Pride, etc)*. With the Academy Award-nominated "End Game", they look at a different topic: death. This production focuses on palliative care, forcing the viewer to think differently about death. After all, it's a topic that we try to avoid, but it will eventually happen to every one of us.

Serious but calm, the documentary is one that every person should see.

*Without Friedman, Epstein directed "The Times of Harvey Milk", a documentary about the assassinated gay politician.

End Game is a look into the final stage of a few people's lives and how they and their families deal with it. I can not say I have ever seen anything like this. I remember seeing my first piano teacher of 4+ years in Hospice as a young kid and being so shocked when she passed. There are many hard decisions and acceptances along this path. Dr. Miller, a palliative care professional, maintains a unique outlook on the whole process and does his best to bring peace to those he can.

I did, however, find it hard at times to stay engaged with the stories because I felt they moved a tad too slowly. Regardless, the film is eye-opening and touching at many different moments.

Wonderful job filming the reality with patients and one family in particular. The doctor talks about how he had to face grief himself in his own body, and this gave him the strength and the inspiration to help other human beings look at this huge mystery, to look at the "end (of the) game", the end of life itself. A gem of documentary showing vulnerability as the ultimate strength.

This poignant documentary by Rod Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman follows the lives of people with terminal illnesses in San Francisco, California. Each one is consulted by hospital staff to try a new way of dealing with their situation, some are led to the Zen Project runned by Dr. Miller, who had a near death at age 19.I

This film tries to show their non traditional methods, separating it from a traditional hospice situation. But one story stands out is Mirta, an Iranian woman dealing with Cancer. It's such a sad situation of her relationship with her family, and their struggles to Mirta's possible mortality. She is offered the way of the Zen Project and other surgeries.

In the end, each person is shown on how they dealing with their terminal medical condition, as they deal with understanding death as a human process.

"We are wired to run away from death but dying is a part of life. " This is a story of four terminally ill patients are about to reach their destination.. who are ready to embark upon a new unknown journey that would relieve them from all the sufferings. Conversations with them, interviews with some of their families as the patients spend their final moments with them.. the candid conversations about the end of a life .. it is surely a tough watch but this short doc is a reminder of the inevitable.. as the healthy ones keep thinking about how to live by all worldly avaricious norms, the sicks just want to live ...it is made in a verite style that this bitter truth that we often brush aside would nudge you that it is going to meet you at the end of the path..

• Purvi.