A Day for a Miracle

The film is, in my opinion, much better than most Hollywood emergency room stories. It flows naturally, but grabs your attention. Gerti Drassl, Leon Baumgartner and Erwin Steinhauer were excellent in their roles.

One piece of this story begins on a family farm in the hills of Carinthia, the southernmost province of Austria.

The other line of events happens in the local hospital. A provincial big shot probably needs a routine medical procedure. He expects a five-star treatment and immediate action. He also wants the procedure to be done by the chief surgeon, a university professor, but the latter left for a scientific meeting. The next best choice for him is a local medical doctor. But the procedure can only be performed by a young surgeon, who commutes every week from Vienna. One of the funny moments of the film happens, when the politician asks the second doctor on the team, if at least she comes from Carinthia. (Owing to a complicated history, and its exploitation by local politicians, Carinthians were - until recently - often wary of outsiders. This movie suggests that even people coming from the cosmopolitan Austrian capital, Vienna, were treated as outsiders.)

The two lines of the story join when the medical team faces a terrible dilemma that does not seem to go away: Do you try to save the life of a person, if, in the very slim chance of success, this person will almost certainly be totally handicapped and a burden to others? To make matters worse, members of the team have completely opposing views.