THE AMERICAN NURSE ( Carolyn Jones 2014)
CAROLYN JONES: THE AMERICAN NURSE (2014)
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SISTER STEPHEN BIOESL IN THE AMERICAN NURSE
A special online COVID-19 freebie about US nurses
To honor the nurses valiantly serving in the frontline of the battle against COVID-19, Kino Lorger is offering their 2024 documentary THE AMERICAN NURSE free on their online film platform (HERE) from now until the end of May.
The film was originally distributed by DigiNext Films/ It came into existence through a 2012 book of the same title created by the acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Carolyn Jones and producer Lisa Frank. It celebrates the work and lives of 75 nurses in a variety of roles ane environments across the US. Jones spent a year on the photography and interviews with nurses, during which she was surprised and her further curiosity aroused. The result was the film.
Jones zeroes in on five of the nurses she depicted in the book, covering them in depth and interviewing their patients and family members about their work. More importantly, Jones filmed the nurses caring for their patients and at work, not sparing us some grim and intense moments like performance of a Caesarean section and clearing the clogged port of a colostomy bag.
The film shows Naomi Cross, RN, a delivery room coordinator at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, intimately working with pregnant women going through complicated birthing processes involving a big team of coordinated women and also helps parents confront prenatal bereavement.
It travels around with former mechanic Jason Short, RN, BSN, now a hospice nurse with Appalachian Hospice Care in Pikeville, Kentucky navigating difficult roads inaccessible to ambulances fo help patients at home and console dying patients' families with a deepfelt sincerity.
It conveys the balance and understanding of Tonia Faust, RN, CCNM, a hospice program coordinator at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola providing end-of-life care to inmates during their final days and months of life, disregarding her patients' pasts while also supporting inmate volunteers who help out.
It shows how former combat medic Brian McMillion, RN, MSN, MBA-HCM, now the coordinator of the Caregiver Support Program of VA San Diego Healthcare System, cares for homeless veterans. Observing him shows his commitment and dedication and empathy acquired through his own traumatic experiences as a medic in Panama.
It depicts how Sister Stephen Bloesl, RN, BSN, director of nursing at Villa Loretto Nursing Home and Villa Rosa Assisted Living in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin conveys her sense of joy in engaging all ages in animal therapy on a farm located where she lives.
This selection shows how early life experiences, sometimes traumatic, may inform a nurse's particular specialties. It provides a different idea of what we may usually think of as a "nurse." Jones introduces herself at the outset, saying "I thought a nurse was a nurse - until I got breast cancer." Then she steps back, but we understand from that the extra-medical function of some nurses, how they provide comfort and empathy - deep humanity - as important as beds and bandages.
As John DeFore points out in his Hollywood Reporter review, noting that it's more educational than of commercial potential, this film works over and above - or "essentially ignores" - the financial and political "realities" of the current American health care system of which the COVID-19 crisis is making us more and more aware. But in so doing, it makes itself accessible "not only to Americans of any philosophical stripe" but, despite its title, universal enough so that even if "the nation transformed into a single-payer utopia overnight" or "Republicans somehow managed to wipe Obamacare out of existence," the film's "emotional observations" would still "hold true."
