Shorts 7: Doc Shorts – Patient

Fiction, reality, the private, and the performed overlap on a routine but emotional day at a medical center.

Director/Writer/Producer: Lori Felker
Starring: Ronna Trapanese | Rainy Armstrong | Naymyo Win | Sabra Michelle | Melvyn Marcum | Suzan Kurry | Lydia Nyachieo | Kathleen Tissot

2023 | 20 mins | US | Color | 🏆 | Documentary, Hybrid, Portrait, Observational

About the Filmmaker

Lori Felker is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films study the ineloquent, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction and have explored empathy, discontinuity, grief, and multiple dimensions. She eschews any particular style or genre in favor of letting content and concerns guide form. Her award-winning short films, such as SPONTANEOUS (2020), DISCONTINUITY(2016) and IMPERCEPTIHOLE (2011) and feature-length documentary FUTURE LANGUAGE: THE DIMENSIONS OF VON LMO (2018), have screened internationally at festivals including The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Slamdance, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, EXiS in Korea, Festival du nouveau cinema in Montreal and Kinodot in Russia. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor, and/or actor for various artists and directors and has programmed for the likes of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Slamdance, and Roots & Culture Gallery in Chicago. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a Wexner Center Residency, a Brico Forward Fund and a Fulbright (Berlin, 2000). She is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Director’s Statement

This film is part fiction, part observation, part improvisation. I worked with professional Standardized Patients (SPs), medical actors who regularly perform as a variety of patients for medical students so the students can practice bedside manner and empathy.

After observing and researching at a few facilities, I settled on the University of Wisconsin Health Sciences Learning Center. All of the SPs in this film work there as SPs in real life. All of the medical students in this film also work there as SPs. For the most part, they are doing their job as they always do, except I wrote the cases and patient character descriptions and there were film cameras in the room. 

The film is a compressed “day in the life of an SP”. I built a light narrative that runs throughout the day, one that follows Gayle the SP (Ronna Trapanese) and Melanie the Med Student (Rainy Armstrong). Simply put, they’re both just “having one of those days” in which their hearts are on their sleeves or a panic attack is just one thought away. The layers run deep, plot and performance are confused, and everyone wears multiple hats in a stressful, but safe environment.