COM Grad’s Film Heads to SXSW Festival

Documentary profiles disabled surgeon’s work abroad

By Vicky Waltz

In the last two years, filmmaker Joshua Weinstein has traveled from the bustling streets of Manhattan to India’s remotest villages, all to document the work of Sharadkumar Dicksheet, a severely disabled surgeon and humanitarian.

The journey has paid off. This month, Weinstein’s documentary, Flying on One Engine, will preview at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Mont. And in March, the film will premiere at the South By Southwest Music and Media Conference (SXSW), a 10-day international festival held annually in Austin, Tex. “This is a huge break for me,” says Weinstein (COM’05), who has high hopes that the documentary will be picked up by a distributor.

The 52-minute film chronicles two years in the life of the 78-year-old Dicksheet, who travels to India’s poorest regions for six to seven months each year to conduct free plastic surgery camps for children suffering from cleft lip, cleft palate, and other facial deformities. Over the past four decades, he has performed more than 125,000 surgeries. American doctors join him each year in performing surgeries, donating their time and paying their own expenses. The camps also provide training for local plastic surgeons. In 2001, Dicksheet was honored with Kellogg’s Hannah Neil World of Children Award and has received numerous other honors. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.

Born in Pandharpur, India, in 1930, Dicksheet came to the United States in 1958 to study medicine. Since 1968, he has split his time between New York City and India. “The film juxtaposes scenes of him in Brooklyn, where he basically lives as a pauper, with scenes in India, where’s he’s regarded as a kind of god,” Weinstein says.

As a result of increasingly poor health, Dicksheet can no longer practice medicine in the United States. He suffered a near-fatal car accident in 1978 that left the right side of his body paralyzed. During his three-year recuperation, he continued to perform surgeries with his left hand. In 1982, he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx and underwent four operations and radiation therapy. He learned to talk through esophageal speech techniques and continued his pilgrimages to India. In 1988, he had a heart attack and underwent angioplasty, then had triple bypass surgery in 1994 after a second heart attack. Today, his heart functions at only 18 percent of capacity.

Click on the video above to watch parts of Weinstein's film

Weinstein says that the documentary’s title comes from one of the most poignant moments of the film. After a grueling 10-day surgery camp, Dicksheet collapses, whispering, “My heart is like four-engine plane flying on one engine. So if that quits, we go down.”

The film begins in 2006, shortly after Dicksheet has been diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm. Despite doctors’ warnings that he will die if the aneurysm ruptures, he forgoes an operation to go to India for his annual plastic surgery camps. “People in India literally bow down to him,” Weinstein says, “because he operates in a wheelchair for 12 hours a day and he’s practically dead.”

Weinstein met Dicksheet through his father, a New York City surgeon who for the past four years has gone to India to perform plastic surgeries to repair childhood facial deformities. The two doctors met when they were residents at a Brooklyn hospital in the 1970s. “Traveling through India was a transforming experience,” Weinstein says. “I ate on the street for a quarter a day and rode trains in third-class compartments. Despite the poverty, there’s such hope among the people.”

Weinstein shot the documentary on a shoestring with the help of an extensive network of accommodating filmmaker friends, many of whom are BU alums. “Everyone worked for free or very reduced rates,” he says. “Former classmates did everything from loaning me equipment to helping with rough cuts and reading grant proposals.”

“The film sounds really serious,” Weinstein says, “but there are actually a lot of funny moments. Dr. Dicksheet is this incredibly compassionate guy, but he’s also rather irreverent. At one point he even insults Mother Teresa for getting the Nobel Peace Prize over him. He’s kind of like an old grandpa who just tells the truth.”

Vicky Waltz can be reached at vwaltz@bu.edu.

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