“How to Die in Oregon,†an intimate and poignant film about the impact of Oregon’s 1994 Death With Dignity Act, won the Grand Jury Prize in the U. S. Documentary Competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, one of the most prestigious awards that can be won by a non-fiction film anywhere in the world.
Director Peter D. Richardson stood atop a field of 16 competing documentaries that were selected from a field of 841 submissions.
“How to Die,†which will have its local debut at the Portland International Film Festival in February and appear on the HBO cable network later in the year, is an account of the process by which several Oregon residents, particularly Cody Curtis, a 54-year-old Portland woman with recurring liver cancer, chose to end their lives with the administration of a physician-prescribed dose of barbiturates.
