In the short documentary Fitting, the Scottish filmmaker Caitlin McMullan finds beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg, and in the unique connection between prosthetist and patient. The film captures how she and her prosthetist, Alison Morton, collaborate to produce the artificial limb via a sequence of measuring, moulding, fitting and feeling. Through her intimate self-portrait, McMullan offers a rare chance to see the extraordinary work that goes into this act of creation, which is at once scientific and methodical, yet also tactile and delicate. And, in her candid conversations with Morton, she provides a revealing look at the contrasting ways each views both the process and the object it produces.
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
15 minutes
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
The police camp where tween girls enter a sisterhood of law and order
28 minutes