The cost of cobalt
In advance of its screening at the Global Health Film Festival (25 Nov–5 Dec), Megan Greenhalgh reviews The Cost of Cobalt—an exposé of how the world’s “insatiable appetite for cobalt” is causing untold damage in mining communities in the DRC.
Film review
Image credit: The Cost of Cobalt
Year: 2021
Director: Fiona Lloyd-Davies and Robert Flummerfelt
Language: English
Rating: Entertaining 3/5 | Informative 5/5 | Inspiring 3/5
With the recent events of COP26 and the Earthshot prize, the buzzword on everyone’s lips—finally— is climate solutions: strategies to protect our planet and future generations.
As climate-consciousness is growing, so is the world’s “insatiable appetite for cobalt”—a core raw material needed for electric car batteries. The Cost of Cobalt spotlights the mining communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that are supporting the world’s transition away from fossil-fuel vehicles.
Fiona Lloyd-Davies and Robert Flummerfelt’s short (but by no means sweet) exposé introduces us to the families in Katanga, DRC, for whom cobalt is a poisoned chalice. In high quantities, cobalt is toxic to the human body, and in Katanga it is seeping into waterways and being consumed in drinking water. Lloyd-Davies and Flummerfelt highlight the growing body of evidence that cobalt mining may be responsible for a range of malformations in the babies born in these mining communities, from cleft palates to stillborns.
Over the course of the documentary, we meet the doctors treating babies affected, families of cobalt miners, and scientists studying this issue. Whilst moving, the film’s intimate focus on these lives is arguably frustrating since it fails to sufficiently engage with the broader issues of climate inequity and injustice that its subject matter throws up.
However, in laying its findings bare the film allows us to come to our own conclusions, perhaps resulting in a more powerful evocation. It is uncomfortable to realise that this celebrated climate solution is damaging the health of the next generation in the DRC, and the film serves as a striking illustration that inequities exist not only in the climate problem, but also in its solutions. What use is there in trying to protect our future generations, whilst hurting them in another corner of the world? The Cost of Cobalt is a painstaking reminder that climate solutions must be equitable to not create further harm.
“The film serves as a striking illustration that inequities exist not only in the climate problem, but also in its solutions.”
The Cost of Cobalt is being screened live alongside Green Warriors: Coal in the Lungs at the Global Health Film Festival on Saturday 4 December, followed by a panel discussion including co-director Fiona Lloyd-Davies. Global Health Film Festival is the annual flagship event of Global Health Film, a UK charity promoting the power of storytelling in global health. More information and tickets can be found on their website.
Dear future children
In advance of its screening at the Global Health Film Festival (25 Nov–5 Dec), Frieda Lurken reviews Hot Docs winner Dear Future Children—an intimate portrait of three young activists and the struggles they go through to fight for what is important to them.
Film review
Image credit: Dear Future Children
Year: 2021
Director: Franz Böhm
Language: English
Rating: Entertaining 4/5 | Informative 3/5 | Inspiring 5/5
Social movements are booming. The last few years have seen protests spring up around the world and leave their mark on the public consciousness—you know activism has become mainstream when Pepsi produces an advert featuring Kendall Jenner handing a can of its namesake beverage to a police officer amidst cheers of a crowd of fashionable, young protesters. Clearly activism “hits the spot”.
Given all this, a documentary like Dear Future Children feels long overdue. It tells the stories of three young women: Pepper campaigns for democracy with the Anti-Extradition Law Movement in Hong Kong; Hilda tackles the devastating impact of climate catastrophe with Fridays for Future in Uganda; and Rayen fights against inequality with Estallido Social in Chile. It goes without saying that each of these issues has dramatic implications for public health. Social movements that promote them don’t only deserve the attention of public health professionals; they should be seen as crucial parts of a country’s public health landscape.
A team of young Europeans followed the three protagonists around with the explicit intention of looking at social movements from a youth perspective. By getting to know the activists and becoming their “friends” and “comrades”, the filmmakers aimed to draw intimate portraits of the three protagonists, their motivations, thoughts, and feelings. The result has already been awarded the Audience Award of the Hot Docs Documentary Festival which automatically qualifies it for the 2022 Academy Awards.
Dear Future Children is at its best when it does what it set out to do—highlighting the struggles that young activists go through to fight for what is important to them. Turns out activism has very little to do with the Pepsi-swigging Kendall Jenners of this world. Instead, Pepper, Hilda, and Rayen—like so many activists—work extremely hard, sacrificing their education and careers, their liberty and safety. Victory often appears unattainable. Stories of imprisonment, injuries, and death combined with lengthy and gruesome scenes of police violence make for difficult viewing.
While we get to know the documentary’s protagonists over the course of the documentary, it remains hard to situate them within their movements. At times, the film risks losing sight of the broader picture because of its strong focus on the clashes between police and activists. As a campaigner, I would have loved to see the film crew use their access to core activists to illuminate some of their movements’ strategies, tactics, and methods, which are so rarely captured by the media. Recent films such as 120 BPM and Knock Down The House demonstrate that it is possible to skilfully balance the portrayal of protagonists’ personal stories with fascinating insights into their political campaigns and movements. Admittedly, both films worked with budgets that Dear Future Children, a production that was mostly crowdfunded, could only dream of. However, had their film crew embedded the three heroes more deeply within their social movements, it may also have become clearer what their unique contributions as young people were.
Nonetheless, Dear Future Children is refreshingly sober in its depiction of the stark realities facing young activists. Although it celebrates its protagonists, it doesn’t glorify or stylise them but presents them as the brave and vulnerable humans they are. If watching these three women giving everything makes even a handful of audience members ask themselves how they could give more, then the Dear Future Children team deserves plenty of credit for that.
Dear Future Children is being screened live at the Global Health Film Festival on Saturday 4 December, followed by a panel discussion including the director, Franz Böhm. Global Health Film Festival is the annual flagship event of Global Health Film, a UK charity promoting the power of storytelling in global health. More information and tickets can be found on their website.
Medicine man: the Stan Brock story
In advance of its international premiere at the Global Health Film Festival (25 Nov–5 Dec), Rosalie Hayes reviews Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story which recounts the remarkable life of Stan Brock and his founding of the charity Remote Area Medical.
Film review
Image credit: Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story
Year: 2020
Director: Paul Michael Angell
Language: English
Rating: Entertaining 4/5 | Informative 4/5 | Inspiring 5/5
“Part cowboy, part naturalist, part lots of other things—he is in many ways a baffling man.” So begins Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story, a documentary focused on the remarkable life of Stan Brock and his founding of the charity Remote Area Medical (RAM).
The film charts Stan Brock’s life from humble beginnings in Preston, Lancashire to living as a vaquero, a barefoot cowboy, amongst the Wapishana people in what was then British Guiana. A chance meeting with a TV producer from Chicago eventually led to Brock presenting a hit wildlife TV show and starring in Hollywood films. But by 1985, he decided to take a different path, founding RAM with the intention of providing basic healthcare to people living in the most remote areas of the world.
Brock’s unusual early career may be what draws the viewer in, and understandably constitutes a significant chunk of the documentary, but he is the first to point out that it’s “not important really”. Indeed, any admiration one has for his resilience as a young man is tainted by his complicity in a colonial administration and his former disregard for the Wapishana people (which he later regrets). Instead, it is what he and the 135,000 volunteer clinicians have achieved through RAM that is truly extraordinary.
Despite its original intention to serve remote regions of the world, RAM soon turned its focus to the 50 million people without access to healthcare in the world’s richest country: the United States (US). Although RAM operates on a shoestring budget and Brock takes no salary, it has delivered free healthcare to nearly one million Americans since its inception. Scenes from RAM’s pop-up field hospitals in some of the most impoverished areas of the US, including the gratitude with which RAM patients receive their care, are moving to witness.
While the issues raised in Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story won’t be news to anyone even vaguely familiar with the US healthcare crisis, it’s hard not to be shocked by the image of hundreds of people camping for days on the pavement so that they can receive basic medical care. The film powerfully showcases the human impact of the politicisation of healthcare and serves as an urgent reminder of the fragility and inadequacy of US healthcare reform. RAM patient Dee Bailey puts it best when she exclaims:
“In the land of the free and the home of the brave, it’s hard. In America it shouldn’t be this hard.”
Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story is being screened live at the Global Health Film Festival on Wednesday 1 December, followed by a panel discussion including the director, Paul Michael Angell. Global Health Film Festival is the annual flagship event of Global Health Film, a UK charity promoting the power of storytelling in global health. More information and tickets can be found on their website.