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Surviving Amina documentary

Original title: Surviving Amina
Year: 2010
Running time: 65 min.
Country: Spain
Director: Bárbara Celis
Screenwriter: Bárbara Celis
Cast: Documentary
Music: Carlos Noain
Cinematography: Bárbara Celis
Producer: Co-production Spain-United States;
Life is Great Productions
Genre: Documentary | Disease/illness
Synopsis: Surviving Amina is a love story challenged by illness and death, an intimate diary on resilience and hope. It’s a compelling lesson on life that explores how we construct meaning from events that defy our emotional understanding: the illness and loss of a child. New York and Italy set the backdrop for this provocative and engrossing portrait of a family of young artists through a three years period marked by the Leukemia diagnosis of their second child, baby Amina, and the aftermath of her death. Shot in a verité style in New York and Italy, this documentary doesn’t follow the medical details; it focuses on the emotional journey of this Swiss-Italian couple as they try to cope with happiness and sorrow, love and contempt, illness and fear.

They have to look after a sick baby, whose nature is tremendously happy, while also taking care of their eldest child, who is equally buoyant and magnetic. In stark contrast the couple’s relationship turns dark, bitter and antagonistic as they deal with the ordeals of hospitals, work, debts, fears and daily challenges. Surviving Amina is not only a chronicle of a dreadful disease; it’s a realistic, sobering and yet incredibly inspiring chronology of love and resilience bounded on intimacy, truth and hope. Without ever judging and with immense sensibility it raises disturbing questions about how we confront the most extreme of circumstances.

Bárbara Celis is a Spanish journalist who lives in New York since 1999. For the past 12 years she has been a regular contributor for the Spanish newspaper El Pais, and since 2004 she is its freelance-correspondent in New York. Her articles have been also featured on the LA Weekly, Vogue, GQ, Cinemania, Rolling Stone, ARS, La Repubblica, Susy-Q, and Ioncinema, among others.

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