Making Every Moment Count
2003 · 38m · Canada
Directed by Leora Kuttner
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Five young people receiving pediatric palliative care speak about being alive and approaching death, alongside families and professionals sharing decisions and fears.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a doc about dying kids—exactly the kind of received-wisdom subject that should be maudlin and unwatchable, and the fact that Kuttner makes it *not* that is almost suspicious; she's clearly allergic to the sentimental trap, which means this probably works in ways the premise doesn't advertise.
Kuttner locates this film in the tradition of direct cinema testimony—Wiseman's precision, the restraint of Pennebaker—but the risk here is architectural: how do you structure five parallel testimonies about mortality without collapsing into montage? The film's formal argument *is* the work, and that's curatorial filmmaking.
What catches is the decision to let silences breathe alongside the voices—not silence as absence but as a choice about pacing that forces you into the actual weight of what's being said, and on a 38-minute budget, that single editorial commitment is what separates this from generic testimony.