Near-final programme 2019

Friday 06 December

	Wellcome Collection 1	Wellcome Collection 2	Workshops and panel discussions	Workshops and panel discussions	Wellcome Collection tours
08:30	Registration
09:30	Welcome, Gerri McHugh, Founder and Director, Global Health Film
09:40	2040 (2019) Damon Gameau (92 minutes + Q&A) Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream. Structured as a visual letter to his 4-year-old daughter, Damon blends traditional documentary with dramatised sequences and high-end visual effects to create a vision board of how these solutions could regenerate the world for future generations.		-	-	-
12:00	Medical applications of immersive technologies (75 minutes) Session generously supported by The Lancet This session brings together an international panel of pioneers using immersive technologies in the medical sphere. Confirmed participants include Louis Derungs who after surviving a 15,000 V electricity shock that left him burned on 50% of his body, paralyzed and amputated of both upper limbs, created a patented innovative solution to acute and chronic pain combining virtual reality, artificial intelligence and neuroscience principles.	Neighbors (2019) Tomislav Žaja (74 minutes plus Q&A) Neighbors is an observational documentary about people with mental illness who leave their institution in the Croatian city of Osijek. After decades spent in isolation they try to put their shattered lives back together.		Film distribution Lauren Anders Brown (90 minutes) So you’ve made a film, it’s at a festival - maybe this one - where does it go from here? Join this panel discussion of decision makers in acquisitions and commissioning in films focusing on global health and hear their trade secrets for making a film that sells and is seen.
13:30	One and Other (2015) Tatiane Feres (2 minutes) UK premiere Challenging the stigma and discrimination held towards those of us who live with the challenges of a mental health diagnosis Dogs Chasing Cars (2018) Jon Holmes (7 minutes) An honest and very frank take on mental health and suicide Steve (2019) Ben Akers (90 minutes plus Q&A) World premiere Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK: twelve men a day, one every two hours. One of those men was Steve Yates, Ben Akers’ childhood best friend. Ben goes on a mission to look at why this is happening. And what men can do to help themselves.	Soyalism (2018) Stefano Liberti and Enrico Parenti (65 minutes plus Q&A) In a world battling with climate change and overpopulation, food production is becoming a huge business for a handful of giant corporations. Following the industrial production chain of pork from China to Brazil through the United States and Mozambique, Soyalism reveals the enormous concentration of power on the hands of these Western and Chinese companies, putting hundreds of thousands of small producers out of business and permanently transforming entire landscapes.	Media Training Bootcamp Anya Sitaram, Rockhopper TV (90 minutes) Practical tips on interview techniques and how to get your message across on broadcast media. Be prepared for some tough questioning in front of the camera.
15:45	For Sama (2019) Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts (95 minutes plus Q&A) For Sama is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice – whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.	Unmasked: We All Breathe(2019) Janet Tobias (40 minutes plus Q&A) Three young South African doctors contract multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. These doctors-turned-patients don’t fit the bill of the average TB patient - older, poor or HIV-positive. Instead, these doctors are healthy, young, ambitious and full of life. Zolelwa, Arlette and Dalene spend months enduring the grueling treatment, taking dozens of pills and capsules. Every day they receive injections so painful that Zolelwa describes them as feeling like they are “being injected with hot lava.” And still, after all of this medication, there is a 60% chance they will die.	Media Training Bootcamp Anya Sitaram, Rockhopper TV (90 minutes) Practical tips on interview techniques and how to get your message across on broadcast media. Be prepared for some tough questioning in front of the camera.	The story of the story Chris Godwin (90 minutes) Still birth, post-natal depression, sexual abuse, dementia: harnessing the unique power of effective, sensitive storytelling to create understanding and empathy. Film-maker Chris Godwin will challenge attendees to create a story based on the research for one of his recent dramas. The session will end with a screening of the actual film that was made.
18:00	The Penalty (2018) Will Francome and Mark Pizzey (86 mins + Q&A) Three extraordinary people embark on journeys of recovery, discovery and rebellion and find themselves centre stage in the biggest capital punishment crisis in modern memory. The Penalty unearths an America where grieving families, botched executions and wrongful convictions force us to question what we think we know about the collective human cost of the death penalty.	Jim Allison: Breakthrough (2019) Bill Haney (90 minutes plus Q&A) UK premiere Jim Allison: Breakthrough is the astounding, true story of one warmhearted, stubborn man’s visionary quest to find a cure for cancer. Today, Jim Allison is a name to be reckoned with throughout the scientific world: a 2018 Nobel Prize winner for discovering the immune system’s role in defeating cancer but for decades he waged a lonely struggle against the skepticism of the medical establishment and the resistance of Big Pharma. The film takes us into the inspiring and dramatic world of cutting-edge medicine, and into the heart of a true American pioneer, in a film that is both emotionally compelling and deeply entertaining			-
20:15	Reception

Saturday 07 December

	Wellcome Collection 1	Wellcome Collection 2	Workshops and panel discussions	Workshops and panel discussions
08:30	Registration

09:30	The Dirty War on the NHS John Pilger (90 mins plus extended Q&A) The latest documentary from renowned BAFTA and Emmy-winning film-maker and journalist John Pilger. "This film is a tribute to a unique institution," says Pilger at the start of the film, which is about threatened democracy. Above all, it is a warning. Pilger investigates the dismantling "by stealth" of the National Health Service, "a last bastion of true public service".
11:00		The Promise Dina Rudick (10 minutes) European premiere A cancer researcher happens to work on the experimental therapy that saves her own father from imminent death. The Waiting Room (2019) Victoria Mapplebeck (29 minutes + Q&A) When Victoria Mapplebeck was diagnosed with breast cancer, she decided to create a film and VR project which would explore each step of her journey from diagnosis to recovery. She began with a smartphone short. Shot entirely on an iPhone X, Victoria filmed her time in waiting rooms, surgery, consultations, CT scans and chemotherapy. The Waiting Room is an unflinching portrait of the blood, sweat and tears of cancer treatment. Victoria makes visible the often invisible parts of cancer treatment, the sickness, the fatigue, the tears and the hair loss. At home she filmed with her teenage son, as they came to terms with how family life was transformed by a year of living with cancer.	The Justice Syndicate A collaboration between recovering theatre company fanSHEN, computational artist Joe McAlister and neuroscientist Dr Kris De Meyer (120 minutes) A top surgeon accused of a serious crime. Conviction would mean planned operations will not go ahead – and the evidence is far from conclusive. The Justice Syndicate is a piece of playable theatre drawing on a jury format. It asks how we fill in the gaps, how we deal with our preconceptions, and how being part of a group can affect all this.
12:30	Eating Animals (2017) Christopher Quinn (94 minutes plus Q&A) What is the alternative to factory farming? Nearly all of the meat, eggs, and dairy we eat comes from the industrial system known as factory farming. This system destroys our environment and harms public health, and never before has humankind caused more suffering. Based on Jonathan Safran Foer's critically acclaimed book of the same name, Eating Animals, spotlights the heroic farmers, whistleblowers, and innovators who are standing up, against all odds, to fight this system and provide a new way forward.	Womenstruate(2019) Lauren Anders Brown (52 minutes plus Q&A) World premiere On any given day 800 million women are menstruating. Womenstruate features seven women of different generations across Africa discussing their experiences of their menstrual cycle throughout the cycle of life.	The Emotional Risks of Filmmaking Rebecca Day and Lindsey Dryden (90 minutes) The role of the filmmaker is a challenging and complex one. We often find ourselves filming with the most vulnerable people in society, our working relationships and experiences are intense and intimate and more often than not, the filmmaker is left vulnerable and open to pain and suffering. Why then, is our individual and collective mental health not given the care and attention that it deserves? A conversation between producer & psychotherapist Rebecca Day, and filmmakers including Lindsey Dryden will explore this, encouraging participation from the group throughout.
14:30	Human Nature (2019) Adam Bolt (107 mins + Q&A) A breakthrough called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) has given us unprecedented control over the basic building blocks of life. It opens the door to curing diseases, reshaping the biosphere, and designing our own children. Human Nature is a provocative exploration of CRISPR’s far-reaching implications, through the eyes of the scientists who discovered it, the families it’s affecting, and the bioengineers who are testing its limits. How will this new power change our relationship with nature? What will it mean for human evolution? To begin to answer these questions we must look back billions of years and peer into an uncertain future.	Be Your Sisters' Keeper (2019) Annie Holmes (9 minutes) World premiere Women who sell sex are coming together to address the violence and stigma that they face. Following moments in the lives of two among an estimated 39,000 women selling sex in Nairobi, Be Your Sisters' Keeper sketches their daily lives and experiences as they raise children, earn a living and organise to have their voices heard. Hibo's Story (2018) Nancy Durrell McKenna (20 minutes) When she was six years old, Hibo Wardere was mutilated - she was cut. On that day, she became one of more than 200 million women and girls worldwide who have undergone Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Hibo discusses the days leading up to being cut - the celebration and joy - and the days after - the pain, anger, and betrayal. In the Name of Your Daughter(2018) Giselle Portenier (84 minutes plus Q&A) An intimate fly-on-the-wall story about some of the most courageous girls in the world, who run away from their homes in Northern Tanzania to save themselves from female genital mutilation and child marriage, not knowing if they’ll ever see their families again.	The Justice Syndicate A collaboration between recovering theatre company fanSHEN, computational artist Joe McAlister and neuroscientist Dr Kris De Meyer (120 minutes) A top surgeon accused of a serious crime. Conviction would mean planned operations will not go ahead – and the evidence is far from conclusive. The Justice Syndicate is a piece of playable theatre drawing on a jury format. It asks how we fill in the gaps, how we deal with our preconceptions, and how being part of a group can affect all this.
16:00		Yoghurt Utopia (2019) David Baksh and Anna Thomson (71 minutes plus Q&A) World premiere Whilst society shut down the asylums, it never truly found a place for the mentally ill. But when a young psychologist at a failing institution in Spain took a handful of patients and started a business, it grew into a multi-million dollar yoghurt brand that now employs hundreds of people with mental health problems.		Clinical Research on Camera: Benefits and Challenges Han Duijvendak and Jane Duckworth, HANDSTAND Films Professor Graham Devereux, Jane Ardrey and Elly Wallis (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) Using TUPUMUE (let's breathe! in Swahili), a 3-year multi-disciplinary study of the impact of air pollution on the development of the lungs of 5 – 18 year olds in different neighbourhoods of Nairobi as an example, this interactive workshop looks at how and why video film is being used in the study, what the challenges are and how we are trying to overcome them. We’ll also show some clips to set the scene and give lots of room for people to ask questions and discuss their own experiences.
18:00	The Drip (2019) Leonie Ketteler (3 minutes) UK premiere The Drip breaks taboos by exploring the ulterior process of a sexually transmitted infection with experimental 3D and 2D animation. Life Growing Up (2018) Simon Baker (12 mins) Hard hitting true stories of young people born with and growing up with HIV in the UK. 5B (2018) Paul Haggis and Dan Krauss (94 minutes plus Q&A) UK premiere The inspirational story of everyday heroes, nurses and caregivers who took extraordinary action to comfort, protect and care for the patients of the first AIDS ward unit in the United States.	El Susto (The Shock) (2019) Karen Akins (75 minutes plus Q&A) World premiere Mexico’s Number One Killer is not cartels. It’s Type 2 Diabetes. El Susto (The Shock) tells the story of how courageous public health activists in Mexico stirred a giant, the powerful beverage industry, aka “Big Soda”, when they took action to curb sugary drink consumption, with sobering and inspiring lessons for the rest of the world.
20:15	Reception and close