Surviving Amina

A love story about hope in the face of death

Surviving Amina Surviving Amina is a resilient and challenging love story about hope in the face of death. It is a compelling life lesson that explores how we construct meaning from events that defy our emotional understanding: the loss of a child.
New York and Italy set the backdrop for this engaging portrait of a family of artists through a three year period marked by the Leukemia diagnosis of their second child, baby Amina, and the aftermath of her death. Shot in a verite style in New York and Italy, Surviving Amina doesn't follow the medical details; it focuses on the emotional journey of the parents as they try to cope with happiness and sorrow, love and contempt, illness and fear. They have to look after a sick baby, whose nature is infectiously happy, while also taking care of their eldest child, who is equally buoyant and magnetic. In stark contrast the parent's relationship turns dark, bitter and antagonistic.

Surviving Amina is not only a chronicle of a dreadful disease; it's a chronology of love and resilience bounded on intimacy, truth and hope. Without ever judging and with immense sensibility it raises disturbing questions about how we confront the most extreme of circumstances.

Website: http://www.survivingamina.com


Laurel Official Selection - Visions du Reel 2010


Laurel Official Selection - New Filmmakers New York Film Festival 2011


Laurel Official Selection - DocsDF 2011


Laurel Official Selection - Milano International Film Festival 2012


Laurel Honorable Mention - Bayou Inspirational Film Festival 2012


Tags: Health; Cancer; Leukemia; Medicine; New York.
FULL SYNOPSIS

The Producers


Barbara is a Spanish journalist and filmmaker who lives in Taipei, Taiwan. Before she lived in London for 3 years and in New York for 13 years, where she worked as a regular contributor for the Spanish newspaper El País and as a freelance writer for El Confidencial, CTXT, El Estado Mental and other Spanish media. Her articles have also been featured on the LA Weekly, Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, and La Repubblica, among others. She specializes in arts and culture, but through her 16 year career she has covered all kind of news, from the 9/11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina to Occupy Wall Street. Surviving Amina is her first documentary, but she has extensive experience as a producer for film and tv. She has a MA in Journalism by UAM/El Pais and she teaches at Escuela de Periodismo El País in Madrid. She has four international Journalism awards.

Making The Film


“Little did I know that asking my friend Anne Lamuniere to shot her second child’s birth would take me on a three-year journey that many people live only in their own flesh, silently without any witness. Four months after Amina’s birth, the baby was rushed into the hospital. After her Leukemia diagnosis, Anne asked me to follow her family on camera. That’s how ‘Surviving Amina’ was born. But what it started as a movie which was going to focus on the ordeals of living with cancer, it took a much more intimate turn”.

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