Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 27 Sep only @ 17:45

Dylan Mohan Gray / India / 2013 / 87 mins

With the NHS’ budget currently under scrutiny, the fact that adequate, cheaper medicine is sometimes prevented from entering the market because of strict patent laws, can be a difficult pill to swallow. Dylan Mohan Gray’s sobering documentary charts how big pharmaceutical companies have a stranglehold on the international marketplace, particularly in developing nations, with exclusive distribution rights of their expensive patented HIV/AIDs medicines.

With talking heads and heartbreaking statistics, Gray depicts the inhumanity of a system that protects profits and monopoly over human life. It brings the debate of intellectual property away from the hedonistic area of entertainment and into a humanitarian sphere. If people are dying and there’s an affordable medicine to save them, does the right to supply a different and unaffordable brand outweigh the right to life? This rousing David and Goliath struggle eventually garners enough media (and therefore government) interest, to publicly deem the industry giant’s actions as amoral. Tremendous. However, herein lies the negative also. The systems that are supposed to dole out equality and fairness are often financed and backed by those that wish to keep the balance uneven. It shouldn’t need an injustice to gather international media interest before those with power intervene. But as Gray shrewdly accepts, this will often be the case, as long as governments take funding from multinational corporations.

Showing as part of the Take One Action Film Festival 2013

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