Documenatary - Precious life

Documenatary - Precious life

Score : 7/10
Year : 2010

Directed by : Shlomi Eldar

Duration : 1h26
Spoken languages : Hebrew, Arabic and a little English (all subtitles in French on the dvd I borrowed)

Subjects : disease, Israeli/Palestinian collaboration


Precious life is a moving documentary directed and narrated by an Israeli journalist, Shlomi Eldar, following his struggle to help a Palestinian family and their Israeli doctors to find blood and bone marrow donors to save the couple's 4 months old baby who suffers from an incurable, auto-immune, genetic disease.
His life expectancy without a treatment would be limited to a year and the family already lost 2 of his previous sisters to the same illness.

The documentary follows them for about a year, in the midst of tremendous tensions, wars and periods of relative calm, and also chronicles each person's individual inner conflicts of profound biases.
Shlomi Eldar's position is clear from the start, and the two doctor's interviewed share it: all life is precious. During his battle to save this baby, he is confronted to the fine line between the needs of a journalist to remain objective and detached in his documentary, and his needs as a human being caring for other human beings, no matter what nation or religion they belong to.
But, for others, the journey may be longer...

Precious life is a story of combats led in the sole purpose of saving lives, surrounded by a crazy war that shouldn't be...
I found that Dr Raz Somech to be very respectful of the patients, and his own tenacity to treat the baby as well as the mother to be more than commendable.
Shlomi Eldar takes no detours and shows the reality of this conflict with great honesty and doesn't embellish nor does he make it appear any worse than it actually is.

He chose very well in Yehuda Poliker songs for this soundtrack - for those rare moments where interviews and narration left a gap for any kind of music, that is.

The medical scenes are very limited, not showing any blood apart for the test tubes ; even during a birth scene, there's almost nothing shown. It's not about sensationalism, and that is helpful for me.

Of course, certain dialogues may at first enrage, but one has to wait until the end to see the evolution, albeit limited, and also to understand the background to certain points of view.

Finally, Precious life is a documentary that should make everyone think and realize the truth : we are all human beings, and all life should be precious in our eyes, because as long as we don't care for one another, the conflicts and wars shall continue... It is in this crazy context that the bone marrow donor decided to remain anonymous, and this context also that prejudices take a long time and a lot of effort to surpass and maybe, just maybe, one day or another, create a bridge for an impossible friendship...