“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

They bent it faster.


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Decades before they launched the first statewide contact tracing program to fight COVID-19 in the United States, and long before they helped battle Ebola in West Africa, three young people barely out of their teens began a movement that would change global health forever. Bending the Arc tells their story.

Not long ago, the public health establishment declared it was impossible to treat poor people suffering from certain deadly diseases. In the 1980s, a fledgling group of unstoppable health advocates set out to change that. Their revolutionary model of training community members as health workers and treating all people with world-class medicine, has forever changed public health.

Bending the Arc is the story of Harvard medical student Paul Farmer, idealistic physician Jim Yong Kim, activist Ophelia Dahl, and the international movement at the center of some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises.

  • “A feel-good documentary that’s literally about making people feel good.”

  • “[Their] quiet outrage over the widely-held assumption that it's futile to treat the global poor drives this story, which is as much about the triumph of a philosophy as of medicine.”

  • “As debates rage about whether healthcare is a right for all or a privilege for those who can afford it, 'Bending the Arc' goes beyond rhetoric to give viewers an inside look at doctors who simply want to make a difference.”

  • “While caped, biologically enhanced avengers dominate multiplexes, ‘Bending the Arc’ chronicles what real-world heroes look and sound like.”

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