Why you should watch... Ask Dr Ruth, an inspiring documentary about a sex therapist
“Don’t sit there and suffer. Don’t fake it. Do something about it.” This is the advice of the celebrated sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, whose life and career is the subject of the uplifting new documentary Ask Dr. Ruth.
The film follows Westheimer in the lead-up to her 90th birthday as she ebulliently whizzes through a heavily laden schedule of authoring self-help books, giving lectures at Columbia and writing a column for Time magazine.
Simmering in the background is an exploration of the psychologist’s traumatic past as a survivor of the Holocaust, whose horrors are reconstructed with hand-painted illustrations that lend a jarring childlike perspective to this brutal reality.
In these reverential moments, Westheimer explains how living through such unspeakable tragedy has shaped her open-hearted, progressive worldview, ensuring that she empathised with all those perceived as subhuman.
A German-Jewish refugee who was carted off on a Kindertransport at aged 10, never to see her family again, Westheimer suffered countless indignities in the Swiss orphanage she ended up in.
Ask Dr. Ruth intersperses these sequences throughout the narrative, emphasising the upheavals she endured to become America’s preeminent authority on sexuality.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer looks out on the Swiss countryside during a visit to the village she lived in as a child refugee during World War II.
You'll laugh, you'll cry.
