Bending the Arc

As the poorest nations battled intractable diseases, a fledgling group of unstoppable health advocates took on a seemingly impossible mission: global health equity. In 1980s Haiti, in a remote region devastated first by tuberculosis and later by AIDS, Harvard medical student Paul Farmer, idealistic physician Jim Yong Kim, and activist Ophelia Dahl successfully raised funding and opened a clinic — but their patients weren't surviving after returning home from treatment. The team eventually realized that clinical treatment wasn't enough; they needed to radically change the way they interacted with the community. Through dramatically increased cultural sensitivity, pointed listening skills, local partnerships, and home visits, prognoses improved mightily, and the revolutionary Partners In Health was born. Kief Davidson and Pedro Kos's revelatory, vigorously researched documentary follows the dramatic success of a hands—on community health model that has, since its first project, rescued millions of lives. From a deadly multidrug—resistant TB epidemic in 1990s Peru to the first Ebola cases in Rwanda, this approach, and the intrepid team that envisioned it, transformed global health.