26/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Philipp Döring takes the viewer on a moving and empathetic trip in a palliative care unit in Berlin

It is a counteroffer to healing medicine. A medical care, that does not focus on making terminal illnesses go away, but rather on making life with them bearable. It’s not about dividing needs between healthy and unhealthy anymore, or medication between pointless and useful, as a doctor explains to a new caregiver. Rather, it’s about giving people stability, a sense of structure, and making their days comfortable. Eat unhealthy food that might not be good for you but makes you happy. Take your cancer meds, that might not make a difference anymore, but give you a feeling of control. Make, as palliative care founder Cicely Saunders said, everything about “giving days more life”, and not about “giving life more days”.

In his four-hour documentary Palliative Care Unit, which premiered at the 75th Berlinale in the Forum section and won the Heiner-Carow Award, German director Philipp Döring might be asking for a lot of staying power from his viewers. But the time invested is well rewarded, offering a window into a secluded world, and one so often marked by death and pain, all about navigating the helplessness of sometimes the patients, and even more so of the relatives. As a society, we often talk about hospices, and indeed, this final station before death does come up repeatedly as a transfer option for those too weak to return home. But palliative care is that stepping stone, the place where patients go when they have acute symptoms, and where further plans for pain management and care are discussed.

Döring never turns his documentary into a showreel of exploited pain. His sensitive and respectful approach is likely why doctors and patients granted him such intimate access to their daily lives. We hear a patient accepting the fact that he will not be returning home this time, that his mobility is gone for good and pondering how to tell his son. We see a woman crumbling less under the pressure of her diagnosis, but the fact that her husband won’t accept her soon-to-be passing, neglecting his own life that should keep going. There is also a bittersweet joy in a patient having left a caring but straining relationship, only to have found true love so shortly before her end. 

Medical supplies, charts and folders are mixed together with documents about people’s estates, flower bouquets and candles burning for the lost souls. In morning meetings, the staff takes time for a ritual for each perished patient, before moving on to the next name. Döring keeps his distance, observing the action, the tears, the mental breakdowns. His gaze never flinches, finding the challenge and the beauty in each scene. His stoic, prolonged observations are at times reminiscent of the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman, even though his gaze feels a bit more removed, less in the heat of the moment.

For every human, his death is an accident, an unjustifiable violation, as the movie quotes Simone de Beauvoir saying, at the beginning. Death might forever be a fearful unknown to mankind. Palliative Care Unit shows, however, how to make it humane and less lonely.

Palliative Care Unit was produced by Philipp Döring.