Seventh Annual CUGH Conference
 
 
Satellite Events | Pulitzer Center Shorts Film Screening


Sunday April 10th, 2016
6pm - 8pm

Hilton Union Square Hotel in San Francisco
Room Plaza A


REGISTRATION

Conference registration is required.
Separate registration for the screening is not required.

PULITZER FILM SCREENING SYNOPSES

The Life Equation | Filmmaker: Rob Tinworth

 How do we decide how to spend limited health care dollars? Some argue powerful computers should crunch the numbers and make the decisions for us, determining what delivers the most bang for the buck. It’s an approach that could save millions of lives, but others question whether algorithms can truly capture the complexities of global health.

As Big Data guides more of our lives, from our cars to our shopping carts, the debate over the role of data in health care intensifies. Caught in the crossfire, doctors around the world face impossible decisions about who to treat when a statistic becomes a patient.

The Life Equation is a documentary filmed over three years in Nepal, Guatemala, and the US. Director Rob Tinworth will screen a preview from the upcoming film, due to be released in late 2016.

 

We Want You To Live: Liberia's Fight Against Ebola | Filmmaker: Carl Gierstorfer

The documentary follows one community’s fight for survival against Ebola through the eyes of Liberians on the frontlines battling to bring the outbreak to an end. The film follows four characters over the course of three months in their struggles against the disease.

Mabel and her team are spearheading the fight against the spreading outbreak. While cases are dropping in Monrovia, the virus has found its way into remote villages in eastern Liberia, where the fight has become a door to door battle against an invisible enemy. By day, Mabel picks up suspected Ebola cases; by night she returns to her regular job as a nurse.

During one of her searches for Ebola victims, she comes across three people emerging from the bush–Tawoo, his aunt Ponawenee, and his mother Gbelawoh. There is fear in their eyes because they know that Ebola is a numbers game. As much as Tawoo will pray, as much as Ponawenee will fight, Ebola will greedily claim every life.

The anger of the people of Taylor’s Town is pointed at one person who they say is responsible for introducing the virus: Stanley. Stanley brought his sick son back to the village – a fateful decision that wiped out his entire family and eventually cost 14 lives.

These characters are interconnected through their relationships, their attachment to the rural Bong County of Liberia, and their experiences in fighting Ebola. Filmmaker Carl Gierstorfer follows them through their journeys, exploring the human toll of the deadly disease.

(Produced by DOCDAYS Productions in co-production with Al Jazeera America and SWR in collaboration with ARTE. Produced with support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Sales: PBS International)

 

Hazardous Work: Diving into the Philippines' Dangerous Underwater Mines | Produced by Larry Price

Filipino divers disappear into water as opaque as chocolate milk as they blindly dig in search of gold trapped in muddy sediment. It's risky business: As a miner goes deeper, he risks a horrific death: underwater tunnels can collapse; the compressor that provides air can fail. Many consider this form of underwater gold mining as the world’s most dangerous job.

Multimedia journalist Larry C. Price began working on child labor in the gold fields of the Philippines in 2012. During a 2013 trip, he traveled to the Camarines Norte region of Luzon, the largest Philippine island. Price encountered this peculiar type of underwater mining in regions where the water table is only inches below the surface. Miners dig pits that are only one meter in diameter and which quickly fill with water. To mine the gold-rich clay, they descend into the water and breathe through thin plastic tubes attached to small compressors. The pits are up to 40-feet deep. Workers wedge themselves at the bottom and work in complete darkness to fill sacks with muddy ore. Often, unstable pits collapse. Almost always in these cases, the accidents are fatal.

As one compressor miner told Price, “You don’t want to go down there. If the sides collapse, we have no choice but to leave you.”

(Produced by Larry C. Price in collaboration with PBS NewsHour, won a 2015 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast.)