The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked what she considered to be the earliest sign of the formation of human civilization. It wasn’t evidence of toolmaking or farming, in her estimation, but the discovery of a human leg bone from many millennia ago – someone’s femur that had broken but healed. Mead surmised this indicated another person or persons had aided the severely injured person, helping them recover.
What Mead was identifying as a sign of civilization comes down to empathy, and altruism. Those are values filmmaker Penny Lane can get behind. In her documentary Confessions of a Good Samaritan, Lane examines her decision to donate a kidney to a complete stranger – someone she would never meet or know — a stranger who would die unless they received a kidney transplant. The film played as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs virtual event series.
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Lane serves as her own main “character” in the documentary.
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“The journey is very much a psychological journey for me to try to answer the question of why I was doing this and really interrogate myself about it,” she explained in a Q&A after the screening. “That was why it had to be me that was the protagonist, because I could have said, Okay, I’m going to make a film about altruistic donation about another donor… But I realized I couldn’t because I wanted to put the donor through such an intense interrogation for such a long period of time. Who would I have done that to? No one else. I just would’ve thought that was really mean to do to anyone but myself.”
Lane said originally she had no plans to make a documentary about her kidney donation but was eventually persuaded to by confidantes.
“A friend of mine…basically said, ‘But you could save more lives! You would save more lives if you told people about this.’ And I was like, yeah, but I really don’t want to. I kind of ignored that, and then the second time someone said that to me, I was kind more ready to hear it,” Lane recalled. “If I’m honest, as an artist my goal is not to save lives. If I wanted to save lives, I would do something else with my career. Ultimately, as an artist, my job is to make art that I think is interesting and that only I can make, and it just felt like this would be interesting and only I can do it.”
She added, “It just felt like, who was I to say to no… The film itself felt like a calling as much as the donation did ultimately.”
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, between 2010 and 2015 only about 3 percent of kidney donations in the U.S. were “altruistic” or “non-directed,” meaning the donor did it for the benefit of someone they didn’t know – someone who likely would have died without a transplant. That’s a pretty heroic thing to do, but Lane said she didn’t want her film to come across as a case for her canonization.
“The hardest part of the edit was just getting the tone right,” she explained. “On the one hand, I wanted it to be funny and almost a little cynical. I sort of expect… some of the audience to come to the topic with little cynicism. So, I want to meet people where they are, but also I was like, ‘But this is amazing. This is the most profound thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.’ I don’t want to lose sight of how incredible and beautiful and fulfilling spiritually and wondrous this whole experience was.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
For the Love of Docs is a virtual Deadline event series sponsored by National Geographic in partnership with the International Documentary Association (IDA). The series continues with a new film screening each Tuesday through December 12. Next up, on November 21, is Breaking the News, directed by Heather Courtney, Princess Hairston, and Chelsea Hernandez.