Branding Illness
In the News • 52m
Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2011 • 52 minutes
A woman in the grip of pre-menstrual dysphoric disease slams grocery carts outside a supermarket in frustration. A concerned young Japanese woman asks her husband if he has ever been happy. Peppy actors in lab coats reassure the audience that depression is like 'a cold of the soul.' These are scenes from some of the many pharmaceutical ads that pepper BRANDING ILLNESS, an eye-opening documentary about how big drug companies create diseases and then supply the medications that can cure them.
It's a reversal of the traditional approach-trying to discover a drug that cures an illness-and one that relies far more heavily on marketing than on research.
The film offers case after startling case of how big pharma creates the conversation around new diseases and then offers up the solutions. Featuring at times acerbic commentary from experts including physicians, historians and medical anthropologists (among them maverick academic David Healy), BRANDING ILLNESS offers unprecedented insight into the ways illnesses and their potential cures are marketed.
Up Next in In the News
-
And There Was Israel
Directed by Romed Wyder • Documentary • 2018 • 52 minutes
The birth of the modern state of Israel was far from inevitable. As AND THERE WAS ISRAEL compellingly shows, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the current crisis is rooted choices made in response to 19th century geopolitics, colonia...
-
Us Kids
Directed by Kim A Snyder • Documentary • 2020 • 86 minutes
From Kim A. Snyder, director of the Peabody Award-winning documentary Newtown, comes an insightful, rousing coming-of-age story of a generation of youth leaders determined to take the reins and fight for justice at a most critical time i...
-
The Son (inside the Russian army)
Directed by Alexander Abaturov • Documentary • 2022 • 70 minutes
In 2013, filmmaker Alexander Abaturov cousin Dima Ilukhin was killed during a Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) operation in the Republic of Dagestan. He was 21. The fighter who shot him in the head and was himself subsequently kil...