Calgary cinephiles can be forgiven for feeling a bit smug. After years of feeling like a second-run city, we’ve seen a plethora of top-notch series come to the city. There’s the Calgary Cinematheque Society, of course, which screens genre-defining (and genre-defying) flicks on a monthly basis. The Fairy Tales film festival has been hosting classic film screenings regularly, and the newly established Burning Moon video is constantly tracking down 35mm prints of horror classics, including Peter Jackson’s zombie-fest Dead Alive, which will screen at the Plaza on May 7.

One of the biggest coups for the city, though, is the Calgary International Film Festival’s presentations of the ongoing Doc Soup series, which wraps up its first Calgary season with a screening of Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders on Monday, May 6 at Eau Claire. The film brings the season full circle — it launched in November with The English Surgeon, another doc about western doctors contributing their time abroad.

Living in Emergency features a small group of doctors struggling to provide medical help in two war zones — Liberia and Congo — and documents all the frustrations that come along with working in impoverished conditions. While in some ways it comes across as a promotional film for Doctors Without Borders, it’s far from whitewashed — the doctors argue with one another, bungle their cross-cultural relationships and generally reveal themselves to be as human as the rest of us.

Documentaries like Living in Emergency aren’t always easy viewing — they can be grisly and downright depressing — but they provide a perspective on the world that few other formats can. With films on the flooding in New Orleans (Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner Trouble the Water) and life in the Serengeti (Milking the Rhino), the series has given Calgarians access to programming that Toronto and Vancouver have taken for granted for years. It’s one more step to enriching our local film culture, and that’s a fine reason for a bit of civic pride.