BFI London Film Festival: Patient

BFI Film Festival: 245 features. 74 countries. 15 cinemas. 12 days. One Festival.

In a Bogotá hospital, a young teenager is gravely ill with cancer. Almost constantly at her side is her mother Nubia. On those rare occasions when she’s not comforting her daughter, Nubia is battling the bureaucratic complexities of the Colombian health care system to ensure her daughter gets the medicine and care she requires, and talking through the increasingly limited treatments offered by the doctors. Focused exclusively on the heroic Nubia—we never see her ailing daughter, but her anguish permeates every frame of this heart-rending film—Jorge Caballero’s documentary is a masterly lesson in ethical restraint and watchful compassion. Understandably, this achingly sad film has distressing moments, but through its admiring portrait of the quietly indefatigable Nubia, Patient emerges as a profoundly touching and deeply humane tribute to a tireless act of parental love.

(Notes by Edward Lawrenson)

Patient (Paciente), dir. Jorge Caballero, Columbia 2015, 71 mins, cert 15.

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