Take One Action 2013: The Cost of Action

What costs making sacrifices for your principles? Two documentaries in this year's new Take One Action strand, The Cost of Action, ask this question of protagonists in very different but related tales. Blood Brother follows a young American who decides to move to India to live permanently as a carer for children suffering from HIV and AIDS; Fire in the Blood takes on the virus and disease on a global scale, recounting how big pharmaceutical companies inflated the price of lifesaving drugs, effectively sentencing millions in developing countries to death.

The intrepid westerner on a gap year volunteering project is a familiar figure in our culture. Deciding to treat this time out as a longer term endeavour is seemingly regarded as an anomaly, as Blood Brother attests. Behind the camera is Steve Hoover, whose best friend Rocky has abandoned their home in Pittsburgh for an orphanage near Chennai. Cynical hackles at first tentatively rise as opening scenes depicting the death of a local child appear in slightly too glossy, colour-saturated digital images.

Hoover has a background as a music video director and it shows in his stagey compositions and slick editing. However, Rocky’s intensity, and his barely concealed antagonism towards Hoover, his crew, and their shared western origins, draw a nuanced and touching picture overall. Later, the child’s death is returned to and Rocky is shown devastated and huddling in his quarters after villagers suggest he is responsible because he tried to remove her to a hospital and she died during the journey. We learn of weaknesses alongside heroism. Rocky is a survivor of childhood abuse and there is an implicit suggestion that this is what propels him to look after other victims. The film’s stylistic veneer grates a little but empathy overtakes and, as Hoover concurs in voiceover, Rocky’s actions are very moving and serve to break down cultural barriers rather than increase them.

A central part of Rocky’s bravery is his fearlessness in treating and getting close, both physically and emotionally, to people who are carrying a deadly virus. In Fire in the Blood, South African Zachie Achmat, a human rights activist who is diagnosed with HIV and contracts full-blown AIDS, puts this into perspective by making a much deeper sacrifice, refusing antiretroviral treatment until it is available to everyone at low cost. Achmat is one of several who are battling Big Pharma and their cruel medicinal monopolies in director Dylan Mohan Gray’s movie.

Packing its narrative with facts and figures, Fire in the Blood takes a more objective approach than Hoover’s work. Focus falls on Yusuf Hamied, a scientist in India who designed an AIDS drug combination to sell for less than $1 a day, when US-based companies were charging $15,000 a year for their treatments. Statistics and impressive journalistic reporting are punctuated by individual stories such as Achmat’s, Hamied’s, and Ugandan physician Peter Mugyenyi’s, who ordered a batch of low-cost medication in defiance of his country’s patent laws, risking imprisonment. Talking heads mixed with archive footage of speeches, demonstrations, and, most affectingly, reams of the casualties of big business’s heinous practices make for a sobering account. The effect is a forceful condemnation of corporate greed alongside a hopeful tract on the lengths some humans will go to to help others.

The Cost of Action finds further focus in big news issues. Pandora’s Promise explores the potential of nuclear energy in a world being rapidly drained by fossil fuel usage, and State 194 charts Palestine’s bid to build democracy and infrastructure as part of its goal of becoming a recognised country. Both further highlight, though, that it is the work of individuals behind the headlines forfeiting their privileges and making extraordinary efforts which drives humanitarian struggle.