A month after receiving a fatal diagnosis in January 2015, Oliver Sacks sat down with filmmaker Ric Burns in his apartment in New York City. For 80 hours, surrounded by family, friends and notebooks from six decades of thinking and writing about the brain, he talked about his life and work, his abiding sense of wonder at the natural world, and the place of human beings within it. Drawing on these deeply personal reflections, as well as nearly two dozen interviews with close friends, family members, colleagues and patients, and archival material from every point in his life, this film is the story of a beloved doctor and writer who redefined our understanding of the brain and mind. D: Ric Burns, US, 2020, 1h54m

"In nearly all of Oliver's pieces, there comes that moment, that epiphany, that shock, when the reader realizes that Oliver was just as strange, and just as wonderful, and just as elusive as the person he was writing about. And there came the moment, too, when we, his readers realized: so are we—so are we." The New Yorker editor David Remnick at Oliver's memorial service, fall 2015

This film is programmed as part of our "Because Science" series, which explores how science, technology, engineering and medicine impact people's everyday lives.

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