Film gives medical students something unusual: a shared clinical and human story that can be paused, revisited and questioned together. That makes it a powerful starting point for discussing empathy, professional identity and the parts of medicine that resist a single correct answer.
During the Year 2 Cinemeducation Student Selected Component at Barts, I helped facilitate conversations using film and television. The value was not in treating fictional scenes as clinical evidence. It was in using them to make assumptions, emotions and professional tensions visible enough to discuss.
A safe distance for difficult questions
Students may find it easier to analyse a character’s behaviour before examining their own. A scene creates distance: we can ask why communication failed, what power was operating or whose perspective was absent without requiring someone to disclose a personal experience.
That distance can then narrow. Once a group has explored the scene, the discussion can return to practice: where might this happen in healthcare, how might I respond and what does the scene reveal about the kind of clinician I want to become?
Cinema does not tell students what empathy is. It gives them a shared moment in which to examine what empathy demands.
Empathy is more than feeling
Medical education sometimes frames empathy as warmth or emotional resonance. Film can complicate that idea. A viewer may understand a character without agreeing with them. A clinician may need to remain compassionate while setting a boundary, tolerating anger or acknowledging that a problem cannot be fixed.
These tensions matter because empathy in practice involves attention, interpretation and action. It asks what the person is experiencing, what I may be missing and how that understanding should alter my communication or decision.
Professional identity is built through stories
Students enter medicine with ideas about what doctors are supposed to be: decisive, resilient, knowledgeable and self-sacrificing. Cinema often exaggerates these images, but that makes them useful for analysis. Which behaviours are celebrated? What is hidden? Who pays the price for the heroic narrative?
Discussing these representations can expose the hidden curriculum—the informal messages about hierarchy, emotion, uncertainty and belonging that students absorb alongside formal teaching.
Facilitation matters more than screening
Showing a clip is not, by itself, education. The learning depends on careful selection, a clear purpose and questions that move beyond whether students liked the scene. Productive discussion might examine perspective, language, silence, power, context and alternative actions.
The facilitator also needs to create enough safety for disagreement. Different interpretations are not a flaw; they are often the point. The task is to keep the conversation thoughtful, evidence-aware and connected to professional practice.
Film has limitations
Cinema can reinforce stereotypes, simplify illness and centre dramatic exceptions. It can make one account appear universal. These limitations should be part of the teaching rather than ignored. Who created the story? What has been compressed? Which voices are missing? How might a real patient experience differ?
Cinemeducation works best as a complement to patient contact, reflective practice and clinical teaching—not a substitute for them.
Taking the work to TASME
At TASME 2026, I presented our approach in a compact communication titled Teaching Empathy and Professional Identity Through Cinemeducation. The presentation received the award for Best Compact Communication Presentation in the Innovation category.
The recognition was encouraging because it reflected an educational idea that is both simple and adaptable. A short scene, used carefully, can open a sophisticated conversation about what medicine asks of people and how students learn to inhabit the role of doctor.
Becoming a doctor requires interpretation
Clinical knowledge is essential, but professional formation also involves learning to interpret stories, recognise uncertainty and notice how our own perspective shapes what we see. Cinema cannot provide the answer to those challenges. It can help us practise asking better questions.
That is its distinctive contribution: it slows the story down long enough for students to look again—and, in doing so, to look more carefully at themselves.
Part of My Side of the Stethoscope.