FILM - The Edge of Life

2022 - ongoing

A Film by Giulio Di Sturco

Everyday, in a handful of hospitals across the world, highly specialised doctors battle death to bring to life the tiniest babies ever born. The youngest ones are only five months and a half. That’s twenty-two weeks old: the edge of life, as we know it. Half of them will die after birth. Half of the survivors will have some disability.

Shall they be resuscitated at all? Some countries like France and the Netherlands say no. In others, like the UK, it is doctors like Charles Roehr and Faith Emery who have to decide.

Charles is the German-born president of the European Society of Paediatric Research; Faith is an Oxford-trained, British neonatologist. A couple in life, they also share the drama unfolding at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of Bristol Southmead Hospital, one of the few in Europe where doctors fight to keep alive babies as preterm as twenty-two weeks.

Of the 140 million children born in the world each year, over 10 percent are premature, a number rising every year. This is due to several factors, including the rising age of mothers and the increasing number of multiple births caused by fertility treatments. More infants die from prematurity in the first month of life than from any other cause. But things are rapidly changing. The technological advancements over the past two decades have been staggering. State- of-the-art medicine has created a new generation of parents raising survivor children. Giulio Di Sturco, the film’s director, is one of them.

The edge of life provides an immersive, unfiltered look inside the NICU of Bristol Southmead hospital. Here, Charles Roehr, Faith Emery and their team make life or death decisions everyday, within minutes. Here, parents in a limbo wait and hope and despair over the news upending their lives.