Steven Soderbergh, his
frequent writer Scott Burns and filmmaker Tony Gilroy have stated over and over
again that pharma-based scandals are an immediate threat to the world and are
grossly overlooked by the media and investigators. Enter Fire in the Blood, an eye-opening expose of western pharmaceutical
companies, which is simultaneously fascinating and depressing for anyone who has
ever taken medication.
Like Michael Moore’s Sicko, Fire in the Blood film is pretty
much a case study of how the US is more or less a massively profitable
playground of a handful of conglomerates leeching off the rest of the world. Director
Dylan Mohan Gray angrily takes his cameras to the AIDS hit third world and
inside the underbelly of American pharmaceutical firms which price their
medicines a hundred times their worth to keep the cash flowing. The very
thought of these big pharma companies exploiting humans for gigantic monetary
gains and still proclaiming to nobly help mankind is sickening in itself, but
to watch the facts unfold on the screen will make you utterly despise America’s
capitalistic proclivities.
Fire in the Blood has its share of shocking images from Africa but
not in a manipulative poverty porn way. It’s hard for any single film to
establish the extent of imperialist healthcare policies because the problems
are not just abundant but systemic and racist. Gray focuses primarily on the way
the western pharmas have become the mafia of the pharmaceutical industry by
misusing the patent laws to maximize their own profits. Interestingly, the film
intercuts to the Indian firm Cipla which was primarily responsible for ushering
a new law that crippled the monopoly of American firms like Glaxo. It’s heartening
to see Cipla’s Chairman Yusuf Hamied standing up against the tyranny of Glaxo and
pioneering the advent of affordable multi-drug combination pills that were once
out of reach for the common man.
Some of the facts in Fire in the Blood may only represent the
surface level of the problem, and the film’s cutaways to an impoverished Africa
tend to get a bit repetitive after a point. Gray’s cameras introduce us to
various people in India and Africa who contracted HIV but are still alive due
to their access to inexpensive medicines in the country. One really inspiring segment
involves a man from the North East who was diagnosed with AIDS in his youth and
went to become a Mr Universe runner up. The film juxtaposes this information
with the fact that a half a dozen pharmaceutical companies make more profit
than the rest of the Fortune 500 put together. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, and
Fire in the Blood is an important
film given the circumstances. Ironically, despite the film’s message about
India being a hero in medicine, hospitals in India are doing exactly what the
Western pharmas are. It’s about time someone makes a film on that.
(First published in MiD Day)
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