In early 2005, at the same Academy Awards ceremony in which Clint
Eastwood's Million-Dollar Baby was named best film, a
Spanish movie called Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) by the young
director Alejandro Amenábar received the Oscar for best foreign
film of 2004. Though worlds apart esthetically, both films explore the
themes of paraplegia and lives deemed not worth living, a cinematic
coincidence that speaks of the enduring importance of issues such as
these.The authors thank The Hastings Center
for beginning our collaboration, Diego Gracia for having fostered it, and
the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Doha for sustaining
it.