Donated to Science

Donating Your Body to Medical School

This award winning film follows a group of medical students and their relationship with the cadavers they dissect. Throughout the film we follow a group of people who donate their bodies to the University of Otago Medical School for students to dissect.

In 2006 we interviewed several people who planned to donate their bodies to the Otago Medical School for students to dissect. We asked them about their lives and their loves, their hopes, their fears, and of course their bodies.

The Otago Medical school is one of the last in the world whose students still do significant human dissection. The donors and the students gave us permission to follow them through this whole process. By intercutting the donors interviews with their own bodies being dissected and the student's reactions for the first time on film, we have the chance to share that amazing journey of the students, the donors and their families.

At the end of the film the students finally get to 'meet' their cadavers. As we show them the original interviews they are forced to revisit their reactions and attitudes to the body, in light of the donor's thoughts and feelings giving the film an emotional climax that it would be hard to equal in any other film, a climax made even more powerful because it is real and true.

This unexpectedly life affirming, sad, funny and above all human film is the result. The emotional punch at the end when the students finally get to see the live interviews with the bodies they've just finished dissecting is as powerful as anything you'll ever see.