Santa Therezinha Hospital

By the end of the 1990’s, the Santa Therezinha Hospital in Salvador, Brazil, was experiencing an exceptional problem with its elder workers and professionals - those who had founded the place many decades before or came to join it in the early years. They were resistant to retirement, afraid to leave the place where they had spent the largest part of their lives. I was invited to portray those men and women. The idea was to make an homage remembering their years of dedication with a project to become the starting point of their retirement process.
The other side of the story is that my father had died, many years before, in a bed of that same hospital. And that made it a sentimental assignment to me. I was instantly invaded by the idea that probably those workers, nurses, doctors, technicians, caretakers, had known and dealt with my father, since he lived there for one long year until his death in consequence of cancer.
Even though I was convinced that I would get positive answers, maybe even memories and stories, I decided to not ask anything. Already in the previous contacts and later, during the development of the whole project, I was surrounded by the simplicity and the humanity of their hearts, constructed throughout decades of dedication in a big hospital for chronicle and terminal patients. For that short period, I felt reunited with my father, who died when I was 10 years old. It was comforting to think that he was treated by such compassionated hands. Brazil, 1997