Fighting for Life

"Fighting for Life" is an Iraq war documentary that takes viewers on a riveting, often painfully graphic journey through the extraordinary efforts of military physicians, nurses and medical aides who receive their training at the elite Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Unlike such critical films as "Taxi to the Dark Side" and "No End in Sight," Terry Sanders's film isn't interested in polemics. As one woman observes in the film, issues of life and death on the battlefield transcend politics. But that doesn't mean that "Fighting for Life" doesn't have an agenda: It was co-produced by a nonprofit group set up to advocate for the university, which over its 35-year history has occasionally been threatened with elimination from the Pentagon budget.

Still, if "Fighting for Life" is propaganda, it's the best kind, largely avoiding editorialization and instead focusing on simple human drama. Sanders follows his characters with a mixture of clinical frankness and deep sensitivity, finally creating an unsettling yet unforgettable portrait of sacrifice and courage -- from a badly burned Iraqi toddler to a courageous Army specialist who loses her leg in Iraq and begins to reclaim her life at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "Fighting for Life" is essential viewing at a time when, five years on, the war's human cost is still too often mired in partisan rhetoric and administration spin.

-- Ann Hornaday (March 14, 2008)

Contains graphic imagery of war injuries and surgery.