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NOW ONLINE: FARIHAH ZAMAN AND JEFF REICHERT’S “REMOTE AREA MEDICAL”
Last week at the the Los Angeles Film Festival, our very own Lady Vengeance, Farihah Zaman, premiered her documentary short Remote Area Medical, co-directed with her husband Jeff Reichert, himself a filmmaker (Gerrymandering) and film journalist. The film — which is embedded below — was made as part of the Focus Forward series, for which 30 filmmakers have been commissioned to make three-minute documentaries. There is, however, a feature-length version of Zaman and Reichert’s film in the works, to be released in 2013; to stay updated on its progress, “like” its Facebook page and follow @RAMmovie on Twitter.
In a recent email, Zaman wrote that Remote Area Medical was
about a group of the same name that sets up free pop-up medical clinics, predominantly in poor rural communities in the US, where people can’t afford or literally have no access to healthcare. They do medical, dental, vision, chest X-rays, mammograms, and a host of other things and see about 2,000 people, who have to camp out overnight in the parking lot to ensure they are seen, in the course of one weekend. We documented one clinic in Bristol, TN in Appalachia that happens to take place on a Nascar racetrack, with some great crew on board Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, Jarred Alterman, Gary Griffin…we had seven crews in total because so much happens in such a short period of time. Heard a lot of amazing stories and will have nightmares about the number of teeth I’ve now seen pulled up close! Too many people we met there had to have half or all of their teeth pulled because they haven’t been able to see a dentist in 20 years.
