Films with heart

Indie films in a medical convention?

And why not?  Two indie (independent) films were presented last week at the 19th Grand Scientific Symposium organized by the UP College of Medicine.  One was “Limang Libo” about a man who robs and kills a student to get the P5,000 he needed to pay a midwife for delivering his child.

The other film, “Ang Ina” (The Mother), is a documentary that follows a single mother who has raised two children and has a third pregnancy.  She talks about how her boyfriend gives her money for her prenatal check-ups, which she foregoes, so the money can go for the needs of the two elder children.  She ends up giving her baby to her boyfriend because she doesn’t have space in the shanty which she shares with her two other children.

I was asked to prepare a commentary on the films and I picked up from the medical convention’s theme, which was “Training the Clinical Eye: Making the Essential Visible.” A “clinical eye” refers to the ability to detect diseases quickly, something which I feel is actually easy to do for physical problems, but developing a clinical eye for social aspects of medicine, can be more difficult.  We need films like the ones shown at the convention to develop this other kind of clinical eye.

Quiapo tales

Health professionals, especially doctors, still come mainly from the upper and middle classes, and the students are often from very sheltered backgrounds.  For several years now at UP’s medical school, we’ve been sending students out to the “Quiapo Medical Center” for a one-day “internship.”  “Medical center” is a metaphorical term since there is no real hospital in the area the students visit, which is Plaza Miranda and the Quiapo church where the famous statues (there are several) of the Black Nazarene are.   It’s a busy place, with hundreds of vendors hawking medicinal plants, amulets, fortune-telling, even the abortifacient misoprostol to the many people who go there with physical and emotional problems.

After they report back in class, I always have students who come up to me saying they had heard of Quiapo and the Black Nazarene but had missed out completely on what Quiapo meant as a place where people seek comfort and healing.

The students could have been assigned to many other places to learn about the social realities that affect health.  Even the Quiapo underpass, next to the church, is lined with beggars, many carrying children with congenital problems, and sometimes with medical certificates from the Philippine General Hospital.

Digital cameras have expanded the possibilities for capturing stories that need to be told, with portable and fairly low-cost equipment for production as well as for dissemination. They can then be shown to audiences from one person downloading the film from the Internet, to several hundred, as Ateneo Professional Schools does with its annual poverty awareness program, films and talks beamed to their campuses outside Manila.

The films shown at UP’s medical conference came from the Quisumbing-Escandor Film Festival, a competition organized by the organization Mu Sigma Pi for independent productions with a medical focus.  The film festival is named after two Filipino physician-patriots, whose lives could very well be the subject of indie films.  Dr. Honorato Quisumbing was killed while on duty at the PGH during World War II while Dr. Juan Escandor was killed while serving in rural areas during martial law.

The vicinity of UP’s medical college is itself an area of many unfolding stories.  The morning of my talk, I decided to park at the college and walk down Pedro Gil over to the conference venue a few blocks away.  In the film “Limang Libo,” one of the supporting characters is a musician who plays on the roadside.  There was man like that in front of the college of public health, playing a guitar, crooning sad love songs.  Further down the street was another beggar, a taong grasa (a person drenched in grime and grease).

Last year one of our medical anthropology majors, Dr. Gideon Lasco, showed his classmates photos and videos of traditional healers from different parts of the country.  One short film showed a healer practicing in Remedios Circle, not too far from the college. There are many more of these healers in the Malate and Ermita area, catering mainly to the urban poor, in the shadow of the PGH.

Narratives of hope

At the medical conference, I shared one story from another part of the vast concrete jungle called Metro Manila.  Several years back a friend called me in the middle of the night asking me to help his friend, whose girlfriend was having a baby at the Quirino Labor Hospital in Project 4.  The hospital waives most fees for charity patients but requires a basic package of medicines and hospital supplies which at that time cost around P900.  But many couples arrive at the hospital without that P900.  Frustrated doctors and nurses hector the couples, asking how they can go through nine months of a pregnancy and still end up unprepared for the delivery.

I got this couple the money, grumbling too about their lack of preparedness, and offered a lift to the family. We ended up in a district in Quezon City which could easily have been Dante’s Inferno.  It was an impoverished area and people milled around, with a thick pall of smoke hanging over the neighborhood.  It was not fog, but the acrid smoke from shabu (metamphetamine). I got to look into some of the shanties and saw adults using shabu right next to their sleeping infants and children.

If we had digital films then, I could have made one, throwing in taxi money and rounding off the P900 to produce “Isang Libo.”

I do wonder if too many of these stories might anaesthesize the students and the professionals.  The students see a lot of suffering and despair in the hospital wards, so even the most horrible of situations captured in films may just end up as poverty pornography.

It would be helpful as well to have more stories of courage and hope from those who care for sick members of their families.  Last week Patricia Evangelista’s “Storyline” featured the parents of artist Romeo Forbes Jr., one of our most promising artists who died in 2006 at the age of 25 from cancer.  The father, a tricycle driver, and the mother, a housewife, spoke of how their son’s career had soared, with growing recognition both here and overseas, and how their dreams began to flicker when their son became ill.  They spoke of many trips to the hospitals, the agonizing at his bedside, the artist’s attempts to comfort and reassure them, and of letting go toward the end.

They have rebuilt their lives, new hopes nurtured with a daughter and other children in the neighborhood with artistic talents.  In “Storyline’s” style, you do not see or hear an interviewer, allowing you to listen intently with glimpses of the artist’s works flashed as a backdrop.  The narratives come from the heart, so you listen, too, with your heart.

We need more films like this to be shown in schools, especially those involved in training for the caring professions.