If there’s one thing I’ll remember from Kief Davidson and Pedro Kos’ Bending the Arc, it’s the enormity and shocking normalcy of economic racism towards the Third World. That may seem an odd observation for a film about a trio of doctors who redefined how the world reacts and responds to epidemics in rural communities. But again and again, we see these doctors run up against the same complaints and objections when they put forward revolutionary findings to the global medical community. When Dr. Paul Farmer, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl announced they had reversed the tide of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in the slums of Haiti by training locals as healthcare workers and using government funds to build infrastructure like hospitals and clinics, other doctors balked. The techniques are unsustainable, they cried! They can’t be duplicated! And, most horrifically, it’s too expensive! Why waste millions, if not billions, of dollars treating these people when their own government can’t take care of them? Never-mind that Haiti was crippled by predatory loans from First World nations that forced them to make massive healthcare cuts, stranding millions of Haitians to wither away and die of preventable diseases. Never-mind that these were living, breathing human beings. The whole project was dismissed as too costly and the World Health Organization explicitly forbade them from continuing their treatment program. What’s more, when they relocated to rural Peru, the local government threatened to deport them if they didn’t stop saving the lives of their most impoverished citizens. Years later when they announced that through similar techniques they had stemmed the tide of the AIDS virus in Third World countries at the height of the 80s pandemic, the exact same objections were raised. The necessary antiretrovirals are too expensive! And besides, one World Bank official sniffed, the natives of Africa and South America don’t keep watches and can’t tell time. How could they commit to maintaining daily treatment schedules?
It’s difficult to watch Bending the Arc without feeling outraged at the sheer injustice of it all: wealthy, well-fed, healthy Westerners dismissing the plights of billions of human beings because it’s “too expensive” to treat them. But here is a film of hope in the face of catastrophe. The film is a veritable hagiography of its three central subjects, particularly Dr. Kim, who went from smuggling banned medications into Peru (as an Asian-American, the customs agents always assumed he was a tourist) to being nominated by President Barack Obama as the president of the World Bank Group. These men and women are unquestionably heroes; it’s not an exaggeration to say their efforts have saved countless lives. However, the documentary rarely lets us get a glimpse of them as human beings, not just stalwart medical crusaders. There are two fantastic exceptions. The first sees Dr. Farmer visiting a tuberculosis clinic in Haiti where the patients are quarantined in rooms flooded with ultraviolet light designed to kill the responsible bacterium. We learn that he brings them movies to watch during their stay. What does he give these rural Haitians to watch during their recovery? Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The second moment sees Dr. Kim being surprised in an interview with a video clip of one of his past TB patients from Peru who’d been on death’s door thanking him for his treatment—the very treatment that had been banned by the Peruvian government. Dr. Kim bursts into tears. “And to think,” he chokes, “we were going to let him die.”
If not for the importance of its subject matter–especially the aforementioned illumination of the economic racism faced by the sick and helpless in Third World countries–Bending the Arc would be easy to write off as a competent if somewhat forgettable piece of documentary filmmaking. Stylistically and tonally, it seems more akin to the kind of docs one would find on the Discovery Channel or in the bowels of Netflix. But in a world that gets more inter-connected every year, its lessons are too vital to ignore.
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