Bending the Arc

Description

Now, more than ever, a film that shows how big problems can acutally be solved by exceptional people committed to social justice, is a welcome thing, indeed. In the early 1980s, a young pre-med student journeyed deep into Haiti’s devastatingly poor countryside, astonished to find so many people living without any hope of medical care. After a season of contributing anything he could to their seemingly hopeless cause, Paul Farmer reluctantly followed the sage advice of a local priest and returned to Boston to attend Harvard Medical School. There he found kindred intellectual spirits in fellow students Ophelia Dahl and Jim Yong Kim (now the president of the World Bank), and an extraordinarily inspirational quest for social justice and universal health care began. Directors Kief Davidson and Pedro Kos chronicle the trio’s remarkable journey in Bending the Arc, combining stills, archival footage, and some very emotional interviews to capture the heartbreaking setbacks and tear-inducing victories of the struggle. Along the way, the doctors encounter a drug resistant strain of TB in Peru, battle the World Health Organization on the issue of healthcare costs, form a critical alliance with gay activists to raise funds to fight HIV/AIDS, rebuild the entire healthcare system of Rwanda, and face down the terrifying threat of Ebola. As the film asserts, underneath the politics, power struggles, and logistics is the fundamental ethical question—should the extremely poor be allowed to die because their medical care is too expensive? Bending the Arc is a stirring, emphatic, and profoundly moving answer to that question. —Gustavus Kundahl

Film Details