Stopping For Death | contrarianfilms

Stopping For Death: The Nurses of Wells House Hospice was just aquired by Passion River Films and will be coming to VOD and DVD in late 2015!

Want to see the film in a theater near you? Visit our TUGG page to request a screening of the film, or see where it will be playing.

Stopping For Death: The Nurses of Wells House Hospice follows four people working a job few Americans would want: tending to a house full of dying people. They are nurses, but they are also therapists, entertainers, disciplinarians, and, perhaps most importantly, family, to these patients. Filmed at one of the only full-time residential hospices in the country we see these nurses waver between fulfillment and despair, clashing with management and fighting budget cuts while trying to keep life as normal as possible for their dying patients.

Press for Stopping for Death:

"Perhaps it is fitting that a film about death and the dying should close the DOXA festival. One would hope, though, that Stopping for Death: The Nurses of Wells House Hospice didn’t end up at the end of the schedule because programmers thought it too much of a downer with which to kick things off.

Because, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not the buzz kill that most might think a documentary about terminally ill patients and their caregivers might be. It has its moments, to be sure, and viewers might (and in one or two scenes probably should) find a tear or two welling up unbidden. On the whole, though, director Wendy Roderweiss’s unguarded look at the nurses who care for people about to slip their physical bonds is hopeful, enlightening, empathetic, and even humorous...

Everyone knows, intellectually, that death is inevitable, that it follows life as surely as night follows day. Few people, however, in our society deal with the subject with as much good grace, compassion, and even humour as these angels."

Martin Dunphey-The Georgia Straight, Vancouver B.C.

Full Review: The Georgia Straight Review

"This is documentary at its most raw, captured as life and death unfold inside Wells House Hospice, one of the only full-time residential hospices in the US. The film follows four people working a job few would desire: tending to the needs of the dying. To be very clear, this is a film that deals honestly and bluntly with people in the final stages of their lives. Scenes of people in the process of dying are often startling. Despite this, Stopping for Death is not a depressing film. It is hard, harsh, extremely sad, but also irreverent, humble, and even funny."

Dorothy Woodend- Director of Programming, DOXA