2008 Films

Flying on One Engine / Be Like Others

• Flying On One Engine

  
  2008. USA. 50 mins. Directed by Joshua Weinstein. Produced by Joshua Weinstein.

  Plastic surgeon and cancer survivor Dr. S. Dicksheet spends six months of every year performing cleft lip surgeries for free in his native India, where he is revered as a god. (At last count, he had completed an astonishing 140,000 surgeries.) The rest of the year, this wine-tippling, lottery-playing, Mother-Teresa-dissing, eight-time Nobel Prize nominee and self-described chick magnet lives on social security and Chinese take-out in a mouse-infested Brooklyn apartment, where he raises money for his charitable work. Like the good doctor himself, this stunning film pulls no punches as it relates the sometimes hilarious and always bizarre survival saga of this utterly enthralling “Saint of Smiles.” MP

• Be Like Others

  
  2008. Canada/United Kingdom/USA. 73 mins. Directed by Tanaz Eshaghian. Produced by Tanaz Eshaghian, Christoph Jorg, Alexandra Kerry, Peter Winotnick.

  In Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death. Transexuality, on the other hand, is not only legal, it is promoted as a “treatment” for gay men and women. In the waiting room of the preeminent sex-change surgeon in Tehran, we encounter young patients who have been forced to see their sexuality as a medical condition to be cured. Their stories bespeak an unsettling post-op reality. One account in particular is so heartbreaking that it transcends the film’s subject entirely, reminding the viewer that the brutality of bigotry is perhaps best revealed when one is encouraged to “be like others.” PB

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