The Face of Altruism

Perfect Strangers, Perfect Kindness

Award-Winning **Video Trailer**

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

Perfect Strangers is a documentary telling the very real and touching story of two unique and engaging people who care.  

One is Ellie Edwards, who embarks on an unpredictably altruistic journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys.

A massage therapist and single mother living on the central coast of California, she met a young woman at a local community college in the early stages of kidney disease in 2007.  This intrigued her in a profoundly unique and compassionate way.  After spending time on the matching donors website where potential donors and recipients can meet, the free-spirited Ellie decided to find someone who was in need of the greatest gift she could ever possibly give:  her “spare” kidney. 

Five hundred miles away in Humboldt County, Kathy Wheeler, a hospice nurse, endured nightly dialysis lasting for hours at a time with the help of her caregiving husband, Jim. 

Learning that she has Polycystic Kidney Disease, Kathy began to look for an altruistic donor after several friends who volunteered their kidneys were found to be a mismatch.  

Wishing to speed up the seven years that she would spend on the national wait list for a kidney from a deceased donor and nearly giving up all hope, she posted her profile on the same website where Ellie had been looking.

Everything changed when Ellie read Kathy’s profile on the online website. 

Ellie decided to donate her kidney to a complete stranger because she felt a need to help others and had the ability to do something about it.  Kathy, facing an imminent life or death situation, wished for more time to be with her family and grandchild.  Both women faced unexpected challenges as their parallel stories unfolded together over the next four years.  

More than 98,000 people in the United States are waiting for a new kidney. Tragically, one-third of them will die before a kidney from a deceased donor becomes available.  

Altruistic organ donation is the new frontier that could significantly increase the supply of organs, yet many people are uncomfortable by the idea.  In the United States, the buying and selling of organs is illegal, and many transplant centers are reluctant to accept kidneys from an altruistic donor like Ellie.

Altruism is the most fundamentally good social characteristic that defines us; doing things for others and not expecting anything in return is at the very core of what makes us human.

Perfect Strangers is about perfect kindness.  It raises questions about what motivates an individual towards such an extreme act of compassion, and exposes the philosophical questions about those acts of compassion, and ultimately, who deserves a second chance at life. 

Dispelling stereotypes and raising awareness of the physical and emotional terrain of organ donation, it’s an intimate portrayal of the process and a study of the human condition, specifically focusing on what motivates an individual towards an act of compassion translated into action.

~Via Perfect Strangers, Jan Krawitz, and Vimeo 

  If you would like to purchase Perfect Strangers on DVD or show a screening, please go here.

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Director Jan Krawitz has been independently producing documentary films for 35 years.  A Professor at Stanford University and director of the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video, her work has been exhibited at film festivals in the United States and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, and scores of others. 

A collaboration between Krawitz and her Stanford graduate students to raise awareness of organ donations, Perfect Strangers has received eight awards at juried film festivals across the nation.