Screening at The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance's annual series Rendez-vous with French Cinema, Thursday, March 2, 6:30 pm and Friday, March 3, 1:45 pm. (Walter Reade Theater, New York City)

Doctors, nurses, other medical caregivers, and patients must deal with suffering, disability, grief, and the threat of death. The "illness narratives" they tell as they struggle with these enormities have provided filmmakers with many medical dramas filled with inspiration and meaning.

Heal the Living is a very fine French film which provides one such touching narrative. It focuses on the great loss of a child and the gift of a transplanted heart that gives new life to a middle-aged mother of two sons.

Seventeen-year old Simon (Gabin Verdet) is a teenager who possesses an extraordinary fund of energy and intensity. In one morning, he romances his girlfriend in her bedroom, bicycles through the near-dark streets of Le Havre, rides his skateboard, and then joins some friends who surf together. On the way home, there is a crash and Simon's body is hurled through the car's windshield. By the time, he reaches the hospital, he is brain-dead.

When Simon's mother Marianne (Emmanuelle Seigner) and her estranged husband Vincent (Kool Shen) arrive at their son's room they are given the bad news by the senior surgeon (Bouli Lanners). A quiet organ donation manager (Tahar Rahim) shares some options with them but it takes a while for them to make a decision, given their shock and mourning.

Heal the Living is directed by Kattell Quillévéré and has been adapted from Mend the Living, a bestselling 2014 novel by Maylis de Kerangal. This gifted French director refuses to judge the fear and vulnerability of these characters and their attendant problems. For example, she beautifully conveys the passion between Simon and his girlfriend. She humanizes the organ donation program by introducing us to its lonely manager, who is very attached to his goldfinch. And she perfectly depicts the isolation of Simon's father who quickly retreats into his work-a-day world of welding after giving permission for the heart transplant to proceed.

In the second half of Heal the Living, the focus is on Claire (Anne Dorval), a middle-aged woman with two sons (Finnegan Oldfield, Théo Cholbi) who is saddened when she is told that her heart condition has worsened. As Claire begins breathing more heavily, she realizes that death may be on her doorstep. So she reaches out to a concert pianist and former lover for consolation.

This illness narrative reveals the ways in which all these suffering individuals are connected; explores the process whereby illness and mortality have much to teach us about the human condition; sheds light on the growing awareness that the brain is the most important organ in the body; and gives us an appreciation of donors whose body parts are used to save the lives of others.