Southampton Film Week: FIRE IN THE BLOOD

Dylan Mohan Gray's powerful and important documentary about the business behind the global AIDS crisis.

Tuesday 14 November 2017

by BRENNAN BACKS

FIRE IN THE BLOOD (Dylan Mohan Gray 2013, narrated by William Hurt) explores the faults in our society and the dominance money holds over the human race. In flashes, through the actions of a select view individuals, it holds out for hope yet this hope is quickly distinguished and replaced with more societal defects. 

Gray expertly weaves personal, professional and activists stories in and around a narrative highlighting corruption and deceit in the pharmaceutical trade. Importantly, the documentary presents stories from across the world, painting a picture to show how the powers that be ruin lives. The documentary constantly reiterates the detrimental effect the pricing of life saving AIDS drugs had on impoverished countries. The AIDS epidemic is revealed as something that could have been handled more effectively and millions of lives could have been saved. Instead, the greed of the big corporations meant over 10 million Africans lost their lives to AIDS and countless more around the world needlessly died.

While the documentary shows how impoverished countries fought back, bringing reasonably priced, life-saving AIDS medicine to the market, the intention is not to spin this into a positive story. It presents a cry for help, one that forces us to open our eyes and see the bigger picture. We live in a world where Zackie Achmat, a HIV activist and one of the documentary’s many interviewees, has exclaimed: “the only reason we are dying is because we are poor”. It is a shameful truth that this film highlights so eloquently.