Educational Media Reviews Online

Actress Babz Chula and her good friend filmmaker Anne Wheeler are embarking on a trip to Kerala, India. Ms Chula has been battling cancer for 6 years and wants to try an alternative to Western medicine at an Ayurvedic clinic in Kerala. Ms Wheeler has always wanted to make a documentary, as she says, “…following a story wherever it takes me and trying to stay out of its way.” The result is their film Chi, an honest look at dying and how it is very much a natural part of life.

Ms Chula begins her stay at the run-down Indian clinic in Kerala, reeling from the effects of chemotherapy and the long, exhausting trip from Vancouver, Canada. She is there for a 6 week stay. The first few weeks of treatment are rough. She is filled with fear, pain, and anxiety, and at her lowest point, questions whether she can even go through with the course of treatment. Slowly things begin to turn around and Babz begins to feel better. She is close to the end of her initial six-weeks, although not anywhere near finishing the prescribed treatment. Ms Wheeler thinks she should stay longer to see if she can continue on with her healing. Ms Chula, however, wants to go home.

Anne Wheeler’s wonderfully warm, comforting voice narrates the film and lends just the right tone. She ingeniously uses video diaries to capture Ms Chula’s private thoughts and feelings that even she doesn’t see until filming is complete. These intimate sessions help develop an emotional connection with Babz that make the film poignant and absorbing.

When they return to Vancouver, Ms Chula’s husband and grown children are waiting eagerly to see her. A new tumor in her brain is discovered, and pending chemo treatments are removed from the calendar once doctors say she doesn’t have long to live. She spends her last days among her family and friends, planning for her death, and saying goodbye. She dies peacefully at home completing the circle of her life. The ending scenes of Ms Chula’s famly tending to her body are beautiful, and something that we in Westernized societies tend to shy away from. This reinforces the fact that death is very much a part of life—a part of our collective chi.

The word “chi”, meaning life force or literally, breath or air, is a perfect title for Wheeler’s film. The trip to India, symbolically portraying the dying process. Initial questioning, fear, anxiety (at that point in the film Babz says that she feels like she is doing something dangerous and that she’s not sure she can go through with it) that are eventually replaced with acceptance and an easing of pain, to the final phase of returning “home.” As Ms Chula says in one of the video diary segments, “I think in the long run this was the thing to do…in the short run I’m anxious to be going home.”

The videography is first-rate and the film moves at the perfect pace. Chi will work well for classroom use at a 60 minute total running time and is broken in to chapters for section programming. Library collections in the health sciences, psychology, and social work will find it a valuable addition.