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Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2008 > March > 10 > Entry

Capsule review: ‘Flying on One Engine’

By Matthew Odam | Monday, March 10, 2008, 01:42 PM

one engine.jpg
If “Flying On One Engine,” director Joshua Weinstein’s debut documentary, was simply the story of a 76-year-old doctor who, despite missing a larynx and having limited heart function, performed hundreds of facial reconstruction surgeries a year for free in India, it would be a compelling piece of storytelling. But Weinstein’s film about Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet is much more than a simple story of good deeds; it is the portrait of a complex individual who, were he not a saint through action, could very well be considered a curmudgeonly quasi-misogynist.

Three decades of tragedy — a car accident in the 1970s, a battle with cancer in the ’80s and a heart attack in the ’90s — left Dicksheet using a wheelchair and living off Social Security in relative obscurity in New York. Despite his physical ailments, the doctor’s indomitable will led him to travel to India, where his almost unfathomable devotion through surgery has led not only to eight Nobel Peace Prize nominations but also a reverence bordering on worship in the communities where he works. It will leave you wondering what it is you might do to help benefit mankind if in only a fraction of the way its central character has.

11 a.m. Tuesday, 1:30 p.m, Saturday at Alamo South

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