Road to Mercy follows doctors and their patients as they struggle to identify the limits of the newly granted right to die. In Belgium, they meet physicians who are testing those limits – going beyond terminal illness to provide an assisted death for suffering psychiatric patients, a scenario that is legal both in Belgium and under Canada’s recent Supreme Court Carter ruling. Road to Mercy documents Canada as it enters the farthest ethical frontier — a place where doctors are allowed to take a life and where we as a country must decide on the circumstances under which they can.
Producer, director and writer Nadine Pequeneza talks about her new documentary Road to Mercy, which premieres tonight at 9pm on CBC.
CraveOnline: How did this project come about?
Nadine Pequeneza: I am a documentary filmmaker and I develop documentary ideas and take them to broadcasters to get them made. Last summer when all the committees were being struck and getting legislation through before the deadline, everything was up in the air and there were a lot of discussions in the media. On a personal note, my mother passed away of liver cancer when I was a teen, and it was a difficult drawn-out death that left a mark on me for sure. Knowing the history we’ve had in this country on the issue, and since then, it was a historic moment. Especially when the Canadian Supreme Court passed it. They had very broad eligibility requirements, and Canada was about to embark on terrain no one had really gone on before. And I thought, this should be documented.
Tell us about the process of making the documentary.
I followed individual patients and doctors through the process of making a decision around assisted death at a time when it was just becoming legal. I didn’t know if they’d get legislation in place by the February 6th deadline but we did know Quebec was going ahead (they had started the discussion long before other provinces, and their legislation was passed).
So we knew it would be legal and there would be assisted death. We started in Quebec with a palliative care doctor and he was originally opposed to assisted death and changed his mind over the course of the discussions leading up to the passage of the law. He became a practitioner offering that service to his patients, so we followed his story and one of his patients. We were looking for someone else in Canada who had a different case that was not cancer, and found an ALS patient. And one patient is in Belgium, where they had assisted death since 2002 – we wanted to look at a jurisdiction where it was legal for a long time, and they have broad eligibility requirements similar to the legal framework here.
Were you there for any of the actual assisted deaths?
For one patient I was. It was in Quebec and it’s a lethal injection by the doctor. I found it be a very powerful moment. We included the audio only. Sometimes hearing something forces you to use your imagination. Many films about assisted death have an on-camera death and I just didn’t feel like this was what the point was of the film. I wanted to engage people in the process. Because it’s not just the person who is impacted but everyone around them.
Deciding to be in a documentary in the final days and weeks of life isn’t an easy decision – people who decided to give of themselves in that way they are very special.
