Personal Effects 2025

0h 58min Director: Gregg Biermann

On October 16th of 2020 my heart suddenly stopped. It remained stopped for several minutes. I was lucky on two counts. The first was that a nurse happened to be standing 20 feet away from me and second that I was close a police station. The nurse performed C.P.R. on me and the police rushed to the scene and employed defibrillator paddles. I woke up three days later in the hospital and was told that I had survived something called sudden cardiac death (S.C.D.). The cardiologists tell me that only one in ten people survive this. After it was revealed to me that someone had recorded my collapse and the subsequent attempts to revive me and I was able to obtain that footage, I thought that I should make a film about this experience and its emotional and intellectual aftermath. Personal Effects is that film.