When director Mark Hopkins set out to make a documentary about Doctors Without Borders, he didn’t want it to be a stereotypical message film.
“We didn’t want to do a clichéd hero story,” Hopkins said in a phone interview from New York Monday. “We wanted to make a real film about people in real situations.
“We’re trying to take people into a situation I really don’t think they’ve seen before.”
It was the first time Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, has allowed anyone such access, and the result is a 90-minute film called “Living in Emergency.”
It’s being screened at select theaters at 7:30 p.m. Monday, including the Cinemark-Movies 10 in Lynchburg.
The screening will be followed by a televised panel discussion moderated by ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas. Panelists include Dr. Chris Brasher, a nine-year MSF veteran whose last field mission is featured in the film; Dr. Tom Krueger, a first-timer whose work is also documented; Sophie Delaunay, executive director of MSF-USA; and author/journalist Sebastian Junger, who has covered their work in war zones before.
MSF is an international humanitarian organization and 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner that assists people threatened by violence, neglect or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, natural disaster, malnutrition and exclusion from health care.
A group of doctors and journalists created it in 1971, and today they provide aid in nearly 60 countries. The majority of the aid workers come from the communities where the crises are occurring, and about 10 percent of each team is made up of international staff.
“I thought the intense situations they work in would yield some really different characters,” said Hopkins, who made his feature-length directorial debut with the film.
He and his crew began shooting in 2005.
They visited Mamba Point Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, where MSF provided emergency care after the Liberian Civil War, as well as smaller towns like Foya and Kolohun, where MSF runs rural clinics.
Crews also followed doctors responding to an earthquake in Kashmir, Pakistan, those who work for the organization’s AIDS Program in Malawi, Africa, and those working in the conflict-prone Democratic Republic of Congo.
The final product is “accurate, but not typical,” said Brigg Reilley, an epidemiologist and MSF board member.
“Each project is just so different. It is somewhat raw, (and) I think it shows a lot of the rewards and a lot of the frustrations.”
Hopkins said he expects the film, which was just shortlisted for a possible Oscar nomination, to come out on DVD in the spring.
For more information about the film or the screening, visit www.doctorswithoutborders.org/livinginemergency.
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