Near Death on AllMovie

This documentary received both the "L'Age d'Or" award from Belgium's Royal Film Archive and the Berlin Film Festival's "International Critics Prize." A six-hour chronicle of the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, it focuses on families, patients, doctors, nurses, religious advisors, and hospital staffers confronting personal, ethical, medical, psychological, religious and legal issues about death and the decisions that must be made about continuing the life-sustaining treatment of dying patients. Janet Maslin (New York Times) wrote that "the film has time to carry its audience from an initially raw emotional response to a calmer consideration of the difficult issues raised here, and finally on to some sort of resolution."