Trust and money. Those were the two major hurdles that stood in the way of New Delhi-based freelance journalist and filmmaker Mandakini Gahlot’s two-year struggle to tell the David-and-Goliath story of one man’s battle of survival against a curable killer disease.

The documentary,From East to West – The Buyers Club, is now in pre-production thanks to funding Gahlot and her partner, Thomas Ellis of Babel Press, received from The Asian Pitch (TAP) commissioning alliance between Japan’s NHK, Taiwan’s PTS and Korea’s KBS.The Buyers Clubwas one of three 2017 pitch winners.

The documentary is about a cross-continental smuggling network that defies international law to move a life-saving drug, Sovaldi, from India to thousands of patients in the West.

A three-month course of Sovaldi is the only known cure for Hepatitis C, a fatal disease that affects between 70 million and 100 million peoplearound the world. But at about US$84,000 for the full course of treatment obtained through regulated channels, most Hepatitis C patients can’t afford it.

“It was not easy to get funding for the film. We pitched it to several broadcasters world- wide, because it’sa story that needs to be told, but they weren’t keen. We also tried to get grants... it was difficult,” Gahlot says.

She points out that there are many stories in Asia that need to
be told, and the talent to tell them. However, without the system ofgrants and support available to documentary makers in the West,many will remain untold. Gahlot also had to win over the Buyers Club and its various advocates in India who work with Australian Hepatitis C patient and generic drugs advocate, Greg Jefferys, enabling patients to obtain a full course of treatment for underUS$1,000.

“What they areis illegal in some jurisdictions, but they believe in the cause. I spent a lot of time with them toearntheirtrust. I had been writing about them for a long time before I decided to this documentary,” she adds.Some of this writing resulted in her receiving the prestigious Balakrishnan Memorial award in 2016.

Based in New Dehli, Gahlot has worked with Babel Press for the past six years. She is also a correspondent for TV news network France 24 and has previously worked for the Indian Express newspaper.

Another of the highlights of the Babel Press collaboration is a 32-minute filmLove is not a Crime, which examines an issue close to her heart – honour killings in India.

Gahlot and Babel are also producing a documentary about the estimated one million-plus Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in “disastrous conditions” in Bangladesh.

“This is the world’s largest refugee crisis, bigger even than Syria,” she says. Gahlot is, however, determined to shift the narrative away from ‘poor refugee victims’, so the documentary follows the efforts of a young man who has set up a radio station for the refugees, and use his story to talk about the crisis. –By Marilyn Cohen De Villiers

Published on ContentAsia's eNewsletter, 4 December 2017