Flying on One Engine Joshua Weinstein

An old man getting closer to the end of the road, and thousands of children who just started their journey… One side enjoys the only thing he likes doing – performing surgery to heal the disfigured, the other side cries, barely knowing what is going on.

Flying on One Engine is the story of a 76-year-old Indian-American plastic surgeon who takes a trip to India every year to operate on children’s facial deformations, mainly cleft lips. The film starts with a baby crying, and Dr. Dicksheet starts to speak about his life. After going through one major car accident, cancer and a heart attack, the doctor is losing his joy for life while suffering from his own medical condition. Director Joshua Weinstein allows the audience to understand Dicksheet’s eccentric personality and the past experiences which led him to do an impressive 500 free surgeries per year in India. While he tells his story, we see his humble, messy Brooklyn apartment. A kind of melancholic feeling comes from Dicksheet, transmitted to the audience through close-ups and sad music. When we see the children with terrible facial deformations, it feels too heavy to take in for a moment.

Morning comes after night and both Dicksheet and the film become more joyful as we follow him to India: He complains about women still hitting on him and Liz Tyler getting too fat. Even though people in India treat him as a god, we see a human being with different dimensions. He doesn’t expect anything from what he is doing, except the Nobel Prize: He complains about Mother Theresa getting it without doing much (according to his standards), and him still not having one after doing 140 000 surgeries gets him a bit upset.

Unlike Dr. Dicksheet, the children’s families do not seem depressed even though they experience such difficult conditions. Weinstein shows us their lives, beliefs and hopes. We witness interesting slang like “sisterfucker” among the medical team, moments of parent-child affection both for the doctor and the families in India, and images that we maybe tend to avoid in our daily lives.

The film gives factual information on many different subjects in a short time, and conveys well the feelings from the people filmed in order to help the audience digest the heavy experience. It is an inspiring story from a talented director who makes his point clearly without too much agitation. Get ready for the feelings of ‘what could I do?’ and ‘where do I sign up?’

Selma Şevkli