minor jive

The Waiting Room Trailer on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

Highland Hospital, perched in the hills of east Oakland in a sprawling old building, provides an intimate portrait of place. It is witness to the most poignant moments in the lives of thousands of Oakland citizens every year. Inside its walls the unpredictable spectrum of human life unfolds; illness & healing, death & birth. The Waiting Room is not just a film. It is a place for change: an organic melding of traditional documentary film and innovative social media. As the nation waits for health care reform the film will follow three people waiting in their own way: a public hospital CEO waiting for the health care system to change, a young woman waiting for the birth of her first child, and an uninsured patient, who has slipped through the cracks, waiting for a miracle after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. In the film, these narratives will be punctuated by content interstitials culled from the social media space, both user-generated and produced: videos submitted online, blog posts cinematically dramatized, photos and stories from the front lines. The tagline of the project, “what r u waiting for?” is directed not just at policy makers but more importantly at individual citizens who now possess the means to use their own voices to push the agenda of health care reform. Hope needs action.