The fever
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The fever |
| Country of production | Austria , Germany , Switzerland |
| original language | English , Luganda , Luo , Mandarin |
| Publishing year | 2019 |
| length | 99 minutes |
| Age rating | JMK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Katharina Weingartner |
| script | Katharina Weingartner |
| production | Markus Wailand |
| camera | Siri Smart |
| cut | Andrea Wagner |
| occupation | |
| |
The fever is a documentary about malaria by the Austrian filmmaker Katharina Weingartner . The film celebrated its world premiere on November 1, 2019 at DOK Leipzig and was shown at the Human International Documentary Film Festival in Oslo and One World Film Festival in Prague , among others .
The fever is concerned with the treatment of malaria in East Africa.
action
The film accompanies the naturopath Rehema Namyalo in Masaka , Uganda and the entomologist Dr. Richard Mukabana from the University of Nairobi in Kenya in her daily fight against malaria. Both try to take action against the disease with local, cheap means, but without the support of international health institutions and foundations they repeatedly encounter financial and bureaucratic resistance.
Rehema Namyalo runs a small clinic in her hometown of Masaka, where she treats malaria patients with the medicinal herb Artemisia annua , which she grows herself. She also shares this knowledge in workshops with the aim that everyone can protect themselves from malaria. Because Artemisia annua is used to extract the active ingredient Artemether , the main ingredient in Coartem, the standard drug against malaria, which, however, is often not available in rural hospitals and the population can hardly afford it.
Richard Mukabana pursues a different path as an entomologist. He tries to prevent mosquitoes, which transmit the malaria parasite, from reproducing by killing them in their breeding grounds. To do this, the biological insecticide BTI could be scattered in pools of water; the active ingredient specifically attacks mosquito larvae; it is harmless to humans and other animals. The production of BTI is very simple, "actually like beer," explains Richard. But it is imported from the USA at high cost. A local factory was built in Nairobi in the early 2000s, but the Kenyan government has not yet issued an operator license. The Swiss entomologist and World Food Prize winner Hans Herren , who was involved in the project at the time, shares with Richard his suspicion that the political and financial interests of the decision-makers prevent local BTI production.
The effectiveness of the medicinal herbs used by Rehema was confirmed by Dr. Patrick Engeu Ogwang, pharmacologist at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in a long-term study on a flower farm with over a thousand employees. Those who drink Artemisia tea once a week no longer have malaria, whereas the others continue to get malaria once a month. Dr. Ogwang explains that pharmaceutical companies are putting pressure on the WHO to ban the medicinal herb because they fear for their own profits and individual African countries do not trust the WHO to oppose the WHO and therefore the medicinal herb cannot be distributed. A humanitarian catastrophe is in sight, as the malaria parasite has already developed resistance to the standard drug Coartem. It is the same as 30 years ago, when the active ingredient artemisinin was already being developed by China, but the WHO had only approved it when Novartis got on board and brought out the drug Coartem. 30 million people have since died of malaria due to resistance to the then standard active ingredient chloroquine .
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has set itself the goal of eradicating malaria, but instead of supporting local solutions, they are investing billions in vaccination research or insecticide mosquito nets, both of which do not come to those most affected by malaria People in Africa.
production
Produced The fever of pooldoks Filmproduktion KG (AT), in co-production with Zero One film (DE) and feature film (CH). He was funded by the Austrian Film Institute , Land Vorarlberg, Film Funding Agency , Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg , German Film Funding Fund , Federal Office for Culture Switzerland , Zurich Film Foundation and the ORF Film / Television Agreement.
The research and shooting for the film lasted more than five years, Katharina Weingartner and her team conducted over a hundred interviews with experts from around the world and got to know their protagonists very well before they began shooting. This made the decision to take the perspective of researchers and activists in Uganda and Kenya instead of letting white experts have their say.
The criticism made in the film of the Swiss company Novartis , which for ten years received an exclusive right to sell their malaria drug Coartem from the WHO , led Swiss television to distance itself from the project.
reception
The film met with great public interest at the DOK Leipzig festival , all three screenings were sold out and afterwards there were lively discussions during the one-hour Q & As with Katharina Weingartner and the malaria experts Dr. Pierre Lutgen and Dr. Jerome Munyangi instead.
The journalist and filmmaker Claudia Euen wrote in the Sächsische Zeitung : "The film" Das Fieber "by Katharina Weingartner was outstanding. (...) The exciting thing about this film: the director only allows doctors and scientists from the region to speak." We finally have to take the other people's perspectives, "she explains, explaining her decision to forego the Western view, which is why the public service broadcasters that co-financed the film are now refusing to broadcast. The European audience is not ready for a film in which These connections are as absurd as the fact that the film was not shown in the competition, because it not only explains the negative effects of global entanglements, but also explains why people are fleeing and how deep the western colonization is has been devouring life on the African continent until today. "
For the film critic Bert Rebhandl , Katharina Weingartner succeeds in “completely dispensing with the common patterns”, he also writes, “the film offers a“ changed view of the history of Africa (...) because malaria is by no means a force of nature, but a phenomenon that was "made naturally" by colonial changes. "
Web links
- The fever in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official page for the film
Individual evidence
- ↑ Age rating for Das Fieber . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ https://filmfinder.dok-leipzig.de/de/film/?ID=24059
- ↑ https://www.filminstitut.at/de/das-fieber/
- ↑ a b https://www.saechsische.de/plus/neuer-film-ueber-gundermann-feiert-in-leipzig-premiere-5135737.html
- ↑ https://www.facebook.com/dasFieber/
- ↑ http://www.dasfieber.com/