FESTIVALS: * Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013
* IDFA 2012 * Official Selection
* Hamptons International Film Festival
* Irvine Film Festival * Official Selection
* Boulder International Film Festival
OPEN HEART
Category |
Health, Human Interest
Year |
2012
Country |
USA
Running time |
40’ - 52’
Format |
HD
Production |
Urban Landscapes Film Production, An HBO Documentary Film , In Co-Production with ARTE
Director |
Kief Davidson
While heart disease is often associated with the excesses of Western nations, severe cardiac diseases requiring surgery are extremely prevalent in resource-poor Sub-Saharan Africa.
Because medical treatment is often unavailable, minor maladies like strep throat are often left untreated, and lead to a host of complications, including rheumatic fever, which – especially in young children and teenagers – can permanently damage the heart valves. Children with the weakened valves show symptoms of fatigue, fever, and bloody coughing. They quickly become weaker as their valve tissue deteriorates, and open-heart surgery – while invasive, dangerous, and prohibitively expensive – soon becomes the only option to repair or replace the damaged valves and save the children’s lives.
There are an estimated 18 million people worldwide afflicted with rheumatic heart disease in need of urgent surgery, almost two thirds of them are children. The disease kills 300,000 people per year. Despite those facts, the Salam Center remains the only facility in Africa capable of such high-standard cardiac surgery, free of charge.
At once a marvel of modern medical engineering and the triumph of an idea, Salam is key in Emergency’s plan to treat and reduce heart diseases in an area three times the size of Europe and home to 300 million people. Building a world-class, technologically advanced cardiac diagnostics and surgery facility in the middle of a desert in Northern Sudan is an impressive feat on its own. Making its services free (including lifelong regimens of prescription drugs and follow-up visits) to anyone who steps through its doors is just shy of revolutionary.
The idea that “the Right to be Cured” should be accessible and free of charge to every member of the “human community” is part of Emergency’s operating ethos. To accomplish that, the Center serves as a hub for the program for pediatrics and cardiac surgery that Emergency is implementing throughout its own medical facilities and local hospitals across Africa.
