The Carbon Thread is an ecofeminist drama spanning 170 years, beginning with Eunice Newton Foote, a nineteenth-century woman whose experiments revealed that an apparently inert gas could profoundly alter the temperature of the Earth. Carbon dioxide was invisible, seemingly passive and largely disregarded; so, in many ways, was Eunice herself.
When her work is presented to the scientific establishment by a man and then largely forgotten, the film begins a journey through two forms of hidden power, the agency of matter and the suppressed agency of women.
A century later, Rachel Carson exposes another invisible force moving through bodies and ecosystems, in the indiscriminate use of synthetic chemical pesticides. Carson confronts industrial culture quick to dismiss a woman who challenges its authority.
In contemporary Australia, a fictional Aboriginal fire practitioner inhabits a very different feminist world: she possesses professional authority, scientific knowledge and a public voice, yet confronts a deeper problem, the limits of the human desire to dominate and control living systems.
As carbon moves through air, bodies, forests and generations, the three women become materially connected across time. The story builds towards catastrophic wildfire, where the power first glimpsed inside Foote’s glass cylinder has become planetary and impossible to ignore.
In 1970s Liberia, Dr Emmett Dennis saw a future for his country in biomedical science. He welcomed international researchers to VILAB, a laboratory that he hoped would strengthen Liberian public health. Among them was Dr Alfred Prince of the New York Blood Center, pursuing a breakthrough against hepatitis. VILAB promised knowledge that could save lives across the world. It also raised a question that would outlast the research: who would share in its benefits?
Prince’s work depended on wild-born chimpanzees captured from Liberia’s forests and on the Liberian people who cared for them, worked in the laboratory and contributed biological samples. The film moves between the forest, the cages and the laboratory to trace how living bodies became part of a global research enterprise. Prince supported his staff and later argued for the chimpanzees’ protection and retirement. His concern for them sits uneasily beside the suffering of animals used in experiments and the limited lasting gains for Liberia’s health system.
During the civil war years, The New York Blood Center departed from Liberia. We assert that when the research ended, the responsibilities did not.
The retired chimpanzees remained dependent on Liberians to survive. Despite huge danger, local people kept the chimps stranded on artificial islands alive, by feeding them through the civil war years and for many more after it ended.
Meanwhile, VILAB, the former laboratory, found a new purpose during the Ebola epidemic, when Liberian scientists tested samples and frontline workers followed the path of infection through communities. Dr Bolay speaks of the country’s scientific potential. Dr Mosoka Fallah recalls what contact tracing demanded during the crisis and how this knowledge, and the care that kept both people and chimpanzees alive, brings the film’s Liberian characters to the centre of the story.
Blood in a Belljar will as who receives credit when discoveries rely on another country’s biological materials, labour and expertise. It will also examine how constructed ideas about forests, hunting and disease can travel outward from research sites like this one. When a place is described as an infectious disease “hotspot,” whose understanding of that place counts, and who lives with the policies that follow?
Ebola and COVID-19 exposed the need for resources that endure between emergencies. Today, The Africa CDC is strengthening cooperation among national public health institutions, while a new agreement with IOM aims to improve preparedness and access to care for people moving across borders. These efforts offer a possible answer to the hope Dennis brought to the laboratory decades ago. The film asks whether biomedical research can serve a greater good that includes the people who give samples, make discoveries, care for animals and face outbreaks where they live.
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'Outspoken' is a feature documentary that journeys across continents and through time, interweaving portraits of rap artists who step up to the mic to reinforce identity, represent their community, confront authority and protest, using spoken word and hip-hop beats.
'Outspoken' opens in the late seventies when rap messaging erupted from the streets of New York. Darryl McDaniels of Run DMC remembers when the Caribbean sound system toast culture arrived in New York, where a generation of youth seized the mic to address poverty and neglect in inner-city life. Once rap was committed to vinyl, it transmitted to far-flung realms where it readily adapted to specific places and people.
In Outspoken, we embark on a global journey that highlights the ways rap lyrics is a contemporary manifestation of timeless oral traditions. Griots from West Africa, Maori Elders and political poets from Myanmar connect rap messaging to traditional forms of poetry and storytelling.
Some artists consider rap’s connection to their specific oral history or ancestry, others embrace rap as a tool to engage with contemporary struggles. We meet ardent wordsmiths and get to know them as friends, leaders, role models, activists, educators and analysts, provocateurs or philosophers in their nation or diasporic community.
We learn that rap can embolden and empower. We also experience how, in less free societies, stepping up to the mic to challenge power can be dangerous.
The rap artists’ personal stories intersect and overlap as each artist touches the lives of others, creating ever-stronger connections since hip-hop first erupted from the streets of New York. Outspoken is a global cypher circle of voices that articulate powerful local and universal messages, and together, they make a vital social commentary for our times.