Fermin Cabanillas |
Málaga (EFE) (THE A). He was the terminally ill “with the healthiest in the world”, and his story is collected in ‘There is a door there’.
This is a film premiered in the ‘Documentaries/special passes’ section of the Malaga Festival and reflects the conversations through video calls between Sureda and the Balearic doctor Enric Benito, who accumulated more than eleven hours of videos and audio messages that were It ended up at the production company ‘Mueca Films’, where a work was built “that deals with euthanasia, but that, above all, is a story about life”.
This is how its director, Juan Ponce de León, explains it to EFE, who carried out the project together with his brother Facundo, and that it has its genesis at the moment in which Dr. Benito received the call from a colleague who told him the story of Sureda , “and the first thing that caught my attention is that because of his last name he could be Majorcan, like me”. From there the story began.
“The first thing I asked him was to send me a video to hear his story in his voice,” says the doctor, who also found that the relationship between the two had to be through video call due to the confinement caused by the pandemic. Through this means, “a relationship between two stubborn people” was established, one who wanted to die and the other who guided him on how to deal with the process as best as possible in a country like Uruguay, where there are no regulations governing euthanasia.
The film was built “based on the more than eleven hours of recording that we received,” explains the director, who had this material when Sureda died, and that it meant “continuous learning, which increases every time we see the film, that I have been able to see like a hundred times ”, he explains.
He asked to die before the disease progressed
The film also begins when only his legs were paralyzed, but he asked to be helped to die before the disease progressed.
“Above all, we have learned from this film the importance of having good conversations because we are not used to talking about what makes us uncomfortable”, and work has even been done to “humanize” the two protagonists, without editing, for example, a scene in which the doctor is interrupted in his work by a construction worker who enters with his wife to do some work around the house.
It was premeditated to leave that scene, because “if we don’t humanize the protagonists, everything remains at a very solemn level”, although without leaving behind hard moments, such as “when he asked me for a shortcut to die, and I ran out of papers”.
In this way, throughout its footage, videoconferences take place between “the healthiest terminal patient in the world” and the doctor who is helping him to die in peace, which happened on September 23, 2020, after being sedated when the disease was already preventing him from breathing on his own, and fulfilling his wish not to be subjected to a tracheotomy.
For the doctor, it is true that the euthanasia debate must be analyzed, but in countries like Spain “it is not that the house has started from the roof, but from the television antenna.”
dignified palliative care
Remember that in 2022 nine people in the Balearic Islands requested assisted death and six obtained it, “but 2,500 people died without decent palliative care, and that is possibly where we should start.”
The film, without revealing how its closure was conceived, ends with the message that communication continues between the two “and that we continue to receive their messages”, highlights the director, and of course his death was not in vain because his interviews caused In March 2020, the debate on the ‘good death’ was resumed in Uruguay, hand in hand with a bill that sought to legalize euthanasia and medically assisted suicide for terminal patients before a medical community with divided opinions.
To this day, three years after the law began to be debated, the practice of euthanasia continues to be considered a crime in the South American country.