After Tiller (15.)
Directed by Martha Shane and Lana Wilson.
Featuring LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Shelley Sella and Susan Robinson. 88 mins.
The Tiller that this is After, is Dr George Tiller, an abortionist who was the victim of a Pro-Life assassination in 2009. This documentary follows the work of the four remaining doctors providing third trimester abortions (after twenty weeks) in the US.
It presents a perfectly contained world of total misery. There are the fundamentalist Christian hate mongers, the doctors whose whole lives are encased by the gloom of what they do and the women who come to see them with a boundless supplies of heart-breaking tales of rape, deformed foetuses, incurably condition or of suicidal despair.
Everything is coated bleak but the film only really shows us one face of it. All of the patients remain unseen, represented by shuffling feet and fiddling hands. The picketing demonstrators are a constant presence outside the clinics (or, in one case, outside a school) but they are not approached by the film makers so the four doctors take centre stage.
The pro-lifers are used as a framing device that gives the doctors moral and heroic stature. Facing up to their horrendous intimidation and bullying, the clear inference is that anything these fanatics oppose must be right. Watching it you feel that their devotion to terminating foetuses might have been more fully explored but everybody seems hemmed in by the situation. You fear any kind of open minded speculation or curiosity will cause chaos and fury to be unleashed on both sides.
Directed by Martha Shane and Lana Wilson.
Featuring LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Shelley Sella and Susan Robinson. 88 mins.
The Tiller that this is After, is Dr George Tiller, an abortionist who was the victim of a Pro-Life assassination in 2009. This documentary follows the work of the four remaining doctors providing third trimester abortions (after twenty weeks) in the US.
It presents a perfectly contained world of total misery. There are the fundamentalist Christian hate mongers, the doctors whose whole lives are encased by the gloom of what they do and the women who come to see them with a boundless supplies of heart-breaking tales of rape, deformed foetuses, incurably condition or of suicidal despair.
Everything is coated bleak but the film only really shows us one face of it. All of the patients remain unseen, represented by shuffling feet and fiddling hands. The picketing demonstrators are a constant presence outside the clinics (or, in one case, outside a school) but they are not approached by the film makers so the four doctors take centre stage.
The pro-lifers are used as a framing device that gives the doctors moral and heroic stature. Facing up to their horrendous intimidation and bullying, the clear inference is that anything these fanatics oppose must be right. Watching it you feel that their devotion to terminating foetuses might have been more fully explored but everybody seems hemmed in by the situation. You fear any kind of open minded speculation or curiosity will cause chaos and fury to be unleashed on both sides.
