I Am Because We Are

The question for the cynic is why not? If you are an international celebrity and entertainer like Madonna, why not make a documentary film about your interest in helping a suffering African country after some tabloid controversy about your private adoption? Why not try to change a perhaps cemented image (remember the Girlie Show World Tour days?) with a show of compassion and caring while the camera spotlights a sick African infant dying in your arms? Why not use your celebrity influence to turn heads, and hopefully dollars, towards a million or so orphans? The answer is beautifully depicted in “I Am Because We Are”.

You become weary about the entertainer’s motives when the self-narrated film starts out with too many sentences beginning with “I”. Realizing after all she is not just the narrator but the writer and producer, but for once not the star, she does answer some questions posed by the tabloids that her fans (myself included ) may have been wondering about. Such as: “Why Malawi? - Why now?” But for those answers you will have to watch it yourself. This documentary is not about Madonna, and nor shall this review be.

The film spotlights the sub-Saharan country of Malawi - one of the poorest nations in the world with a population of about 12 million, where more than one-twelfth of its citizens are orphaned children who lost their parents to AIDS. In exploring the impact of such a large number of parentless children, heart-wrenching personal stories of loss are revealed, complete with names of victims; pictures and video of overflowing orphanages, hospitals and juvenile prisons that go on like an extended Save the Children ad. Your attention is starting to wane when applicable words of wisdom from well-known experts in their field are interjected. Nobel Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu says “You don’t have to be rich to be good, generous and compassionate,” and from President Bill Clinton: “What we have in common is as important as our interesting differences”.

I appreciated the inclusion of the tumultuous history of Malawi (independent from Britain since 1964 followed by a dictatorship) as an answer to the question – “How did they get this way?” The complex answer to “Why is it staying this way?” - comes in vignettes on extreme poverty, hunger, corruption, violence, lack of education, destructive spiritual rituals, superstition, genital mutilation and a general lack of hope. It would be interesting to watch this film and count just how many times the word desperate is used.

It feels like the filmmakers are ultimately hoping that the viewer will take a look in the mirror, asserting that all people “want to cling to what is familiar even though they know it is holding them back,” and that this cycle of behavior is embedded in citizens not just in Malawi, but around the world. To prove their point, we see visual global images of war, vicious religious ritual, drug use and more. With this premise, the film moves beyond pulling heartstrings and into pushing buttons. And, having one’s buttons pushed is what turns audiences on, provokes thought and action. Bingo-they did it!

So the film starts as a story about the AIDS / orphan epidemic in Malawi and ends as a story about world problems and world solutions. By looking at the globe through the lens of Malawi, the viewer realizes that the film’s overarching message of hope and determination is as contagious as AIDS. In seeing, caring about, and helping Malawi, we may just help ourselves. Only the creative genius of a person like Madonna could spin that so poignantly.

I recommend this film to healthcare providers not just because the cinematography alone is stunning, but for those that have a global and humanitarian interest, it does communicate about many of society’s most challenging issues. I recommend it to all others simply for its look in the mirror philosophy as that may be the proper remedy for any problem, not just in Malawi but in any country, city, home, or hospital room.


Reviewer Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Boxes of Popcorn
Written, produced and narrated by: Madonna
Directed by: Nathan Rissman
Available: Entire film can be watched on Hulu and You Tube, also available on DVD

Lost in Laconia

Imagine a young boy that lived isolated in an institution his entire life. Surrounded by grungy brick walls, dark, dank sleeping wards with beds lined up crowded one after another, a large open room with toilets and showerheads without stalls. That same boy becomes a man and is sterilized to prevent reproduction. He never sees the people he was born to for the rest of his life. He has siblings that don’t know he exists. His presence on Earth is barely known by anyone except the nurses, doctors and therapists that care for him at the institution. Now, fast forward eighty plus years. The society that created this institution has undergone a transformation. The civil rights movement has taken place, wars have been fought and lost, and the American dream has changed. This man, that was doomed to a lifetime of condemnation and segregation from the rest of the world, is set free. And, unthinkably, he becomes a productive member of society with a story to tell. That story is Lost in Laconia.

This story is a documentary film about the first institution of its kind (and last) in New Hampshire which between 1903 and 1991 accommodated men and women who were “labeled feebleminded, deficient or disabled”. It is the work of New Hampshire resident Gordon DuBois, who was employed in several different positions at the school beginning in 1977, until it closed its doors permanently in 1991. Mr. Dubois, who wrote and produced this film, was an amateur historian who felt compelled to safeguard the historical files, pictures, and footage, from the Laconia State School when it looked like they were going to be discarded during the school’s final days. Mr. Dubois reports that he couldn’t imagine at the time that he would eventually create the means for this beautiful, tragic, heart wrenching, and cathartic story to be told. The coaxing of a group of parents involved in the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability Leadership Series and the help of filmmaker Bil Rogers was the impetus. Combining many oral histories with previous employees, “inmates” (as they were called) and their families with historical archives, twenty years after the Laconia State School closed, our eyes are opened.

This film does exactly what it is supposed to do; it takes you on a historical journey, beginning where it should, at the beginning. It very poignantly takes the viewer on a ride through the account of how humanity handled “those less fortunate”. Answering some puzzling questions regarding how and why our society decided that the best thing for certain children and adolescents who had been rejected by society was to stigmatize, institutionalize and isolate them. Ending the excursion in the current day, with a current lens, which is zoomed in on the triumph of the victims, despite challenges, and the tragedy of what it is they are still unable to overcome. Perhaps due to the stress that resulted from some reported horrific experiences at the Laconia State School.

Lost in Laconia is one of those thought provoking films that puts a spotlight on the history of this specific institutional paradigm in order to help us remember what not to do with those we don’t know what to do with. I highly recommend Lost in Laconia. There were similar institutions throughout the country at the time, and the Laconia State School may or may not have an uncommon story. But, it is a story worth seeing and hearing. Especially for those in the helping profession, like nurses, who feel provocation caring for those with modern day sociocultural challenges. Heartfelt thanks go out to Mr. Dubois and his associates for their insight and presumption in making this film. Because of them Lost in Laconia has been found.

Reviewer Rating: 4 out of 5 Boxes of Popcorn
Produced by Community Support Network
Written and Produced by Gordon DuBois
Directed, Produced, and Edited by Bil Rogers
Available at local New Hampshire Libraries or on the web at www.csni.org

The filmmakers are currently working on an instructional guide to accompany Lost in Laconia. It is intended to be used for educational purposes. If you would like more information about obtaining this film or the guide please visit www.csni.org

The New Medicine

Hosted by Dana Reeve (wife of the late Christopher Reeve) before her untimely death from lung cancer in 2006, this documentary film presented for television by PBS explores the optimal future of medicine on the horizon where technological and human discoveries are harmonized.

Part one of this film explores the mind-body connection in this new era of medicine, by going inside hospitals, clinics, research centers and academic centers to explore new ways of knowing about the influence our body has on our mind and vice versa. The filmmakers uncover the paradigm shift on the medical horizon from patient to person: the whole person, including the mind. Allopathic medicine has always used feeling terms such as “hope”, “worry”, and “broken hearted” in relation to the patient’s experience which suggests an understanding that the mind and body have a relationship of paramount importance. Why then doesn’t the current medical model treat the mind and body as one, or at least treat the mind concurrently when treating the body?

The film highlights many different research studies with favorable outcomes when the extraordinary power of the mind-body connection is embraced. At Duke University Medical Center, Tammy was 26 weeks pregnant when her water broke. Duke offers Tammy daily guided imagery sessions aimed at controlling her stress level knowing that stress in an uncomplicated pregnancy can induce labor and in a healthy person can suppress the immune system. By treating her mind, Tammy’s stress level is lowered and best possible outcomes are likely to improve, and they do. This is one of many examples highlighted where the use of integrative (alternative, complementary, holistic, etc) medicine is used to cross the mind body chasm.

Part two of this film explores the physician patient relationship, and the dehumanizing of patients in a technologically advanced healthcare system. The neglected “softer side of medicine” is being taught at Drexel University School of medicine using actors to role play with medical students in the discussion of difficult conversations. Like when a doctor has to inform a mother that her child’s fight with cancer is coming to an end since there is nothing else modern medicine can do. Drexel recognizes the inadequacy of the current model where physicians spend an average of six minutes with each patient, and are “so enamored of technology and specialization” that they have lost sight of the individual. The individuall, that we know after viewing part one of this film, has the power to heal themselves if guided so. Drexel recognizes the tendency for seasoned physicians to replace optimism with cynicism.

Part two goes on with several vignettes of patients whose failure or success in the healing process was directly related to their relationship with their own healing; guided or misguided as it was, by modern healthcare. While probing into our current healthcare system’s propensity to give science an embrace (and leave the patient in need of one), it is asserted that “science can inform medicine....but it can never explain it all” and the human condition is in direct relationship to healing. It wraps up with the notion that “caring is at the root of the physician patient relationship and in the absence of curing, healing is still taking place that involves caring.”

At this writing this film is five years old. We still have not reached the caring equals healing horizon. Arthur Kleinmen, MD at Harvard University states “There is no reason we can’t be as humanly sophisticated as we are technologically sophisticated” and I agree. I criticize the film for embracing only the physician patient relationship in part two and excluding nursing and the other disciplines. The film doesn’t have the cinematography, bells and whistles of other nationally released big screen documentaries. It forgoes any red carpet aspirations and puts the spotlight on the patient, which is where it belongs.

3 out of 5 boxes of popcorn
This film is not rated.
Directed by Muffie Meyer
Available on DVD and Netflix.