Defining Hope is a story about people weighing what matters most at the fragile junctures in life, and the nurses who guide them. It's a documentary that follows eight patients with life-threatening illness as they make choices about how they want to live, how much medical technology they can accept, what they hope for and how that hope evolves when life is threatened. It is optimistic and helps us define what 'quality of life' really means for ourselves and our loved ones.This movie is critical and relevant right now, with our rapidly aging population and incalculable challenges in healthcare and end-of-life care. We aren’t dying the way we used to. We have ventilators, dialysis machines, ICUs—technologies that can “fix” us and keep our bodies alive—which have radically changed how we make medical decisions. In our death-denying culture, no matter how sick we get, there is always “hope.”Diane is a nurse caring for end-stage cancer patients when she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer herself. 23-year-old Alena undergoes a risky brain surgery that destroys her short-term memory. 95-year-old Berthold lives with his elderly wife who struggles to honor his wish of dying peacefully at home.Defining Hope follows these patients and others— and the nurses that guide them along the way— as they face death, embrace hope, and ultimately redefine what makes life worth living.