Malgorzata Bugaj reflects on Medfest, a festival which brought together short documentaries and healthcare, and explores the role of film in medical humanities.
In May 2025, the University of Edinburgh hosted Medfest, a one-day festival that brought together experimental and documentary film with healthcare. In reflecting on the event, Erin Manning’s idea of the minor gesture emerged as a useful framework. Manning (2016, 1) defines this concept as a “gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation.” While the major determines social norms and systemised ways of thinking and doing, the minor “invents new forms of existence, and with them, in them, we come to be” (Manning 2016, 2). Minor gestures often pass unnoticed but can challenge and disrupt established norms.
Manning develops her argument in the context of neurodiversity and political activism, focusing on what she calls “autistic perception,” “not only to honour neurodiversity […] but to make a political case for the necessity of creating techniques and minor gestures that open existence to its perceptual more- than” (Manning 2016, 14). “Autistic perception,” understood as a divergent mode of lived experience, and the efforts to make it more visible alongside neurotypicality, demonstrate how the minor can intervene in the major.
Medfest is another instance of such minor gesture. The event amplified how documentary films can provide fresh and often alternative insights into lived experiences of health and illness. By combining these individual voices, some from the margins of official medical discourse, the festival sent a collective message that was not only stronger but also potentially transformative.
A crucial remark at Medfest was made by the event organiser, Amy Hardie, a documentary filmmaker working with scientists, health professionals and policy makers, and leader of the FilmMedicine Research Group. Hardy emphasised the significance of being trained in the act of looking and highlighted the value of health professionals, filmmakers, audiences and broader society being supported in the determination not to look away.
Discussions about the act of looking in medical contexts are often framed through Foucault’s clinical gaze, which privileges the practitioner’s objectivity and reduces the patient to an object of examination. To quote Foucault ([1963] 2012, 24): “paradoxically, in relation to that which he is suffering from, the patient is only an external fact; the medical reading must take him into account only to place him in parentheses.” Medfest challenged this power imbalance by placing individuals and communities firmly at the centre. Its short documentaries functioned as minor gestures that contested the detachment of the clinical gaze, transforming the act of looking into one of relational openness rather than control. In this context, the camera and cinema screen operate less as instruments of surveillance and more as attentive, compassionate companions responding to Donna Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble.”
Entanglements between film and medical humanities
Medfest was a collaboration between Medfest Egypt and the FilmMedicine Research Group at the University of Edinburgh. Founded in 2017, Medfest Egypt is led by Khalid Ali, a stroke consultant, author and cinema correspondent for the British Medical Journal. The festival pairs film screenings with workshops and discussions to create bridges between the worlds of healthcare and filmmaking. Its goal is to inspire health, arts and cultural sectors by creatively raising public awareness of health-related issues, stigmas and important societal topics.
The University of Edinburgh’s FilmMedicine Research Group connects practice-based creative researchers and makers working with sound and visual media with leading professionals from medicine, veterinary medicine and science, health in social science, psychology, music and film. The group fosters projects which employ creative methods with therapeutic aims to engage with communities beyond the academic sphere.
The Medfest Edinburgh programme showcased a curated selection of documentaries on mental and physical health, bringing together diverse voices of experience and different forms of audio-visual expression. It featured films made by a range of filmmakers, and in various contexts, which unexpectedly resonated with one another through their visual choices, subject matter and approaches. Topics ranged from the training of midwives to endometriosis, bipolar disorder and bereavement. The aim of the event was to discuss how film can impact medicine and how medicine impacts film. Medfest consisted of two panels, featuring some new work by students at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Futures Institute and alumni from the University of Edinburgh.
Illness and treatment narratives
The morning panel featured the responses of three panellists from different areas of the University of Edinburgh: Amy Hardie, the main organiser; Sara Brown, a clinical academic dermatologist and researcher, caring for patients of all ages with a wide range of skin diseases; and Malgorzata Bugaj, who teaches film and media studies at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Open Learning, and whose research merges film studies and medical humanities.
The first session in the panel explored personal films on illness and healing in which filmmakers conveyed their own lived experience. Tethered (Banos 2024) followed the fluctuations of a young person’s life with a chronic illness, Part of Me (Lyon 2025) centred on managing a stutter, while Miss Your Call (Kallies 2024) reflected on grief. The filmmakers in this session looked back at their own journeys and used the documentary to reflect on complex relationships with other people who were at the centre of each short documentary. The three directors were present to discuss the films with the audience, highlighting yet another key relationship: that between the filmmaker and the viewer.
The second section in the panel presented narratives which were co-created with patients or health practitioners. In A Glimpse on Love (2022), its director, Alexandre Amaral, attempted to convey, through the medium of film, the deteriorating sight of a loving mother. Fitting (McMullan 2023) contrasted the perspective of the director, an amputee, and her prosthetist. After the Haze (Zou x Mei 2025) documented the experience of a person living with endometriosis. Here, filmmakers were attentive witnesses – observers and listeners who “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) – making the act of looking and filming part of the story.
The final perspective explored in the morning panel was that of health activists and NGOs leading change beyond official systems. Jane’s Story (Koskei 2025) took up the difficult topic of female genital mutilation in an account of defiance and resilience based in Kenya. Con Madre (McCarthy 2017), produced for Every Mother Counts, an organisation working to improve maternal health and safety, spotlighted the training of Indigenous midwives in Guatemala, a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Central America. These documentaries highlighted film’s ability to take viewers on a journey to cultural and geographical contexts different from that of the Scotland-based audiences. By weaving together interviews and observational footage, Jane’s Story and Con Madre illuminated how social contexts, healthcare systems and personal identity are inseparably bound. Most importantly, these films highlighted minor gestures of defiance against dominant systems.
Creative responses to illness in expressive and experimental artist films
The panellists in the afternoon included Neneh Rowa-Dewar, a scientist with over twenty years’ experience in qualitative research and teaching in the health field; Lotte Hoek, a cultural anthropologist whose research intersects anthropology and film studies, particularly practices in South Asia; and Agnese Sile, a lecturer and researcher whose work focuses on visual illness narratives and critical disability studies.
The films that began the panel portrayed difficult journeys with titular conditions: Prosopagnosia (Fraser 2021) and Bipolar (Lin 2024), along with a meditation on long-term recovery from addiction, Clean (Stern 2022). This segment echoed the opening session in its focus on first-person narratives that framed illness or disorder as a disruption of the self. The three films were not so much about mental health and divergence but, rather, about how these conditions are performed, embodied and made visible, demonstrating that cultural representations are themselves part of the entangled medical landscape.
The following section, titled “Imagined Expressive – Different Pasts and Futures,” appealed to viewers’ embodied memory and embodied witnessing. Virtual Voice (Mirghani 2021), a satire shot on a mobile phone and through Zoom, asked what it means to be embodied in the age of data and the digital. Ama (2018), directed and performed by French dancer and diver Julie Gautier, explored how a body feels when it is submerged underwater and visualised the experience of breathing below the surface. Using archival material, including popular film, Dead as a Dodo (Habiballa 2022) revived on screen the extinct bird, vividly alive in popular culture, and posed questions about the denial of embodiment. The documentaries in this session focused on the act of looking as that of embodied attunement to sensory impressions – or the lack thereof.
The closing section, “Creating Dialogue: Patients, Doctors, Each Other,” featured works in progress: A Butterfly Hug (Abo Basha), which observed, over the years, a group of Egyptian children with genetic skin disorders; Dominika Svecova’s production employing film as therapy to visualise what a patient is going through; and Gene Therapy (Hardie), a science production for doctors, scientists and medical students. With two of the filmmakers present, this part created an invaluable opportunity to gather audience feedback, which might go on to shape the final production. Central to this section were viewers’ acts of looking.
While most of the films included in Medfest dealt with physical or mental health challenges, the symposium ended on a highly positive note with Is It Okay to have a Bad Day? (Cohen 2020). This short documentary/music video is part of an interdisciplinary project combining cognitive science and film. The film was created with and for young adults with the aim of sharing their advice for navigating a bad day and, more broadly, promoting mental health coping skills. The lyrics draw on Tal Ben-Shahar’s (2021) concept of “the permission to be human,” which normalises negative emotions, along with positive ones, as part of the full spectrum of human experience.
Short documentary film and the “Es” of medical humanities
The field of medical humanities has been defined by three “Es”: ethics, education and experience (Whitehead and Woods, 2016). During events such as Medfest, these core concerns of the medical humanities come to life. Intimate on-screen portrayals of patients, caregivers and health practitioners in short documentaries, paired with responses from filmmakers and panellists in Medfest, invited the audience to engage deeply with the nuanced realities of illness, recovery and care. In doing so, the festival not only fostered broader understanding and awareness but also created a reflective space in which to consider moral dilemmas linked with a particular health condition. Medfest highlighted two additional “Es”, however. The first is empowerment which involves amplifying the voices and enhancing the agency of health professionals, patients, caregivers, and communities within the broader landscape of healthcare discourse and practice. The second is entanglement, a term which recognises the complex interconnections inherent in diverse health and illness experiences, and which has become so central to thinking in the field.
Medfest highlighted the value that documentary film can bring to medicine by fostering the exchange of entangled and interdependent perspectives. In these encounters, film can be seen as an intermediary, a go-between, carrying messages between individuals and disciplines. Events such as Medfest reject siloed thinking by emphasising how health, illness, healthcare, lived experience and wider socio-cultural contexts are intertwined and do not exist as neatly bounded. As a minor gesture which unsettles the dominant ways of thinking, Medfest challenges the authority of clinical objectivity. It also provides an opportunity for health professionals, filmmakers, audiences and broader society to develop a capacity and openness to look at health conditions beyond the biomedical perspective.
About the author
Malgorzata Bugaj is a film and media studies teacher (Centre for Open Learning) and researcher (The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities) based at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research bridges the fields of medical humanities and film studies, with a focus on issues related to ageing and neurodegenerative diseases. She is particularly interested in the ethical dimensions of film representations connected to (health)care. Malgorzata is also a 2024 graduate of the medical humanities programme at the University of Durham.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Agnese Sile for her contribution to this review.
References
Ben-Shahar, Tal. 2021. Happiness Studies: An Introduction. Springer International Publishing.
Foucault, Michel. [1963] 2012. The Birth of the Clinic. Taylor and Francis.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.
Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods, eds. 2016. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh University Press.
Filmography
Amaral, Alexandre, dir. 2022. A Glimpse on Love.
Banos, Briana, dir. 2024. Tethered.
Cohen, Shalhavit-Simcha, dir. 2020. Is It Okay to have a Bad Day?
Fraser, Steven, dir. 2021. Prosopagnosia.
Gautier, Julie, dir. 2018. Ama.
Habiballa, Leena dir. 2022. Dead as a Dodo.
Kallies, Elizabeth, dir. 2024. Miss Your Call.
Koskei, Wesley, dir. 2025. Jane’s Story.
Lin, Jing, dir. 2024. Bipolar.
Lyon, Mark, dir. 2025. Part of Me.
McCarthy, Clancy, dir. 2017. Con Madre.
McMullan, Caitlin, dir. 2023. Fitting.
Mirghani, Suzannah, dir. 2021. Virtual Voice.
Stern, Miranda, dir. 2022. Clean.
Zou x Mei, Wenqi, dir. 2025. After the Haze.
