A man with only one kidney is standing in front of a gravestone. Six feet below him lays his other kidney, inside the body of a woman with three. Underneath his shirt there's a 12 cm long scar, where his lowest rib used to be. He says " I have tried everything. I regret nothing".
Blooming Life is a documentary film project that wishes to recount the struggle against kidney failure of a Chinese woman and her family. An international and interdisciplinary team, with members from China, Italy and Sweden, will travel to China in order to document this true story, a year after.
TingTing Yang, Chinese, the brain behind the operation, has a background in experimental filmmaking and scriptwriting. She will coordinate the whole project as the director.
Mariadele A. Rossoni, Italian, with a background in interactive art, photography and post production, will be the art director.
Erik Månsson, Swedish, with a background in independent documentary filming, will be the interview script supervisor.
Together they will delve deep in the medical situation of today's China, and its controversial insurance system. Through interviews with the surviving family members and documented nowadays lives of the patients that nowadays struggle with kidney failures, and who live in the same hospital as the woman in the story. The condition of hospital structures in China, the undemocratic insurance system policy of leaving the patient's family with most of the responsibility and most of the costs of the medical treatments, and the traditional Chinese view on filial piety and organ transplant "die with the exact same body that your parents gave you", are all themes that Blooming Life wishes to address. When life has a cost, when grief is combined with financial struggle, when the life or death of a family member is left to the mercy and wealth of her own relatives, family dynamics are unveiled and family love is put to a terrible test.
Blooming Life is a movie that wishes to inspire and comfort families across the world, as well as inciting the Chinese government and population to rethink the medical system and to reexamine their traditional views, because with a joint effort from both parts China could become a land where income doesn't influence the chances of surviving serious diseases. But above all, Blooming Life is the story of a family united against a fatal illness, a theme that is international and that goes beyond politics and culture-- love is the universal theme of humanity.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This a new project we plan to do from now till the end of this year.
For more information:
http://sites.google.com/site/bloominglifegroup/
