FilmJuice have my review of Dylan Mohan Gray’s documentary about the pharmaceuticals industry Fire in the Blood.

Since Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine demonstrated the existence of a large potential audience for documentary film, many have tried to use film as a means of raising awareness about particular injustices and so bringing pressure to bear on people with the power to make a difference. The problem with this approach to documentary filmmaking is that if the film becomes merely a means to an end then there is little incentive to put anything in the film other than what is strictly necessary to change minds and win support. As a result, films like Louie Psihoyos’s The Cove and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me are often little more than rhetorical exercises that manipulate audiences into agreeing with their point of view rather than seeking to educate them about the nature of the world at large.

One of the challenges of documentary filmmaking lies in striking a balance between moral simplicity and emotional accessibility on the one hand and accuracy and educational potential on the other. Often, learning more about the world means losing touch with simple moral principles and realising that even the most hideous atrocities happen as a result of people acting in good faith. In the real world, people do not wear black hats and even if they did, it would probably mean that they were goths.

Dylan Mohan Gray’s documentary opens with a very simple moral equation: Millions of people in the developing world are dying of AIDS but while humanity has the technology to prevent those deaths by using retro-viral drugs to prevent HIV from turning into AIDS, these drugs are under the control of multinational corporations who would rather allow millions to die of preventable diseases than see their profit margins slip. Obviously this is a morally intolerable situation but humanity lacks the political will to nationalise the corporations and bring their resources under the control of institutions with the desire to resolve morally intolerable situations. As a result, the film follows a group of activists as they work to broker a compromise that will allow the morally intolerable situation to be resolved without embracing #fullcommunism. The great thing about this film is that, in seeking to explain why this situation came about, the filmmakers manage to educate their audience while never losing sight of principle. It turns out that the real problem with AIDS in the developing world is not patent law but the obvious corruption and cowardice of Western governments.

Turns out some complex truths are morally simple after all…