Bellevue Meaningful Movies Zoom Event

The Waiting Room is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. The film – using a blend of cinema verité and characters’ voiceover – offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices.

The ER waiting room serves as the grounding point for the film, capturing in vivid detail what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance.  It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans.

Reviews
“An excellent, riveting documentary, revealing the raw compassion of health care providers trying their best to deliver care in a broken safety-net system. The Waiting Room offers a glimpse into the struggles of patients who are terrified about not only the crisis that brought them into the emergency department, but how they are going to pay for the care once they leave.”