"Going Home"

Physicians Returning to their Impoverished Hometowns and Fighting toTurn Things Around

Clip Running time 3:30

© Laura Seltzer, Seltzer Film & Video 2006

Going Home is an intimate view of men and women who grew up in impoverished communities around the world and achieved financial and social success as physicians in the United States. Fueled by an intense desire to share their good fortune and their medical knowledge with those they left behind, they return to the villages and communities that they once called home. With intense fortitude, these dedicated doctors take on the system—whether wading through the red tape of a Baltimore housing project or paying off corrupt customs officials to get medications to a desperate African village.

We watch the drama, frustration and exasperation unfold as they operate on patients without anesthetic or electricity, deliver babies from women whose bodies are wrecked by drug addiction, and try and come to terms with the limits of their ability to make a difference. And then we join them as they return home, to their new lives in wealthy, prosperous American neighborhoods.

Going Home takes you behind the scenes and reveals this compelling world through the eyes of remarkable physicians from all areas of the world, and examines the emotional toll as they walk between worlds that are so very far apart.