This past week’s P.O.V. was another one worth taking a look at. The Self-Made Man focuses on the decision of one man to kill himself rather than face a set of potentially serious (though not necessarily terminal) health issues. It’s likely to be controversial regardless of how you feel about assisted suicide or those related issues because this case and the man are unique.

Most unusual about this entire movie is that Bob Stern, the man who kills himself, explains his decision himself, on camera. Fond of making homemade TV pilots and video messages, he decided to explain to his daughters why he is contemplating ending his life via videotape. If, in case, he actually decided to do it, he wanted them to know why. Susan Stern, the director and his daughter, uses the footage brilliantly with interviews with her mother and brother (who were there and who tried to talk him out of it) and other friends who knew him. By the end of the hour, you get a real sense of who this man is and why it made sense to him to end his life.

My difficulty with the discussion is that the alternative to killing himself was to face surgery to repair a aneurysm on his aorta and a potentially aggressive case of prostate cancer. They didn’t really know how bad the prostate cancer was. That’s where I struggle with this… was it really the same as someone facing terminal cancer, knowing that they had a limited time left? Where is that line, if it even exists?

That is, at the core, what this film is about. It’s a documentary, no doubt, but one that uses the story of Bob Stern to ask whether a man who built himself up from humble beginnings, a self-made man in any sense of the word, could also have a self-made death. Like most good documentaries, this one raises more questions than it answers. There are some good questions, too.