Action Research: The National Medical Ethics Film and Photo Festival; an Experience Report

The National Medical Ethics Film & Photo Festival was held in February 2020 and ended with the registration of 487 works which 80 films and 36 photographs of them were finally selected and peer reviewed. The present article focuses on the films of this festival and tries to explain the experience of attracting, selecting, and judging films through the design and holding a festival by using action research method. The article, also, tries to analyze the selected films (50 documentaries, 20 short films, and 10 unspecified films) from medical ethics point of view. In this way, the thematic adaptation of the selected films with 16 topics declared by the festival has been used. One of the obvious findings of this study is the difference between the views of filmmakers and experts on medical ethics. This difference becomes more significant when we see that the number of films related to the 16 topics declared by the experts is one less than the number of the films that the filmmakers made and submitted to the festival on the 7 topics neglected in the text of the call. It seems that the camera of filmmakers in the field of medical ethics mainly focuses on the commitment of professionals and the vulnerability of patients. On the other hand, considering the number and variety of films in the festival, another finding of this study can be considered as the possibility of using short and documentary films to teach some concepts of medical ethics to medical students.