Faced with her sixth surgery and an ongoing hormone imbalance, the filmmaker turns the camera on a difficult patient—herself—and analyses the chances for a happier, healthier life.
“…the deft interplay of voices, words and images creates a steady accretion of metaphors and insights that are sharp and multilayered. While Friedrich effectively critiques Western medicine and demonstrates exhilarating filmmaking skills, its true achievement is as self-portraiture, boldly revealing a woman in all her difficult, naked complexity.”
—Holly Willis, LA Weekly
“…engrossing, good-humored, and confidently assembled…Recovery captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with medical practitioners.”
—Dennis Harvey, Variety
“What could have been a health-care screed becomes a middle-aged meditation on mortality. ‘You frighten yourself with that fear of not being totally in control,’ says her therapist. ‘What would happen if you gave that up?’ One answer is Odds itself, which settles down into its own engagingly crafted, smoothly mellow rhythm.”
—Ed Halter, The Village Voice
The Odds of Recovery (2002)
Directed, written, shot, edited and sound edited by Su Friedrich
Additional cinematography by Joel Schlemowitz
Funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, and Charette Communications
65 minutes, 16mm and video, color
Award:
Femmedia Award—Best Documentary, Identities 2003 Film Festival, Austria
Selected Screenings:
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Japan; Osaka Women’s Film Festival, Japan; Madcat Women’s Film Festival, San Francisco; National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Oakland, CA; Wisconsin Film Festival; Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago; London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; Athens Film Festival, OH; The New Festival at BAM, NY; American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Conference, Montreal; 58th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Colgate, NY; 31st International Women Films Festival, Creteil, FR; Pride Film Festival, Manila, Philippines; Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco; Wisconsin Film Festival, Madison; London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, England; Vancouver International Film Festival, B.C.; Princeton University Documentary Film Festival, NJ; The New Festival at BAM, New York; Immaginaria Film Festival, Bologna, Italy; USA Film Festival, Dallas, Texas; Inside/Out Film Festival, Toronto, Canada; “Queer Verite” Documentary Film and Video Festival, Korea; Two Boots Pioneer Theater, NY; Punto de Vista Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain; La Filmoteca de Galicia, Spain; La Filmoteca Valenciana, Spain; Filmoteca Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain; Cineteca, Madrid, Spain
