¡Salud!

Find out what puts Cuba on the map in the quest for global health. With special guest facilitator Robert Rattle.

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Sault Sainte Marie
Friday August 22, 2008
Screening begins 20h30
Venue: vélorution outdoor theatre (162 Old Garden River Road) @ dusk

United States / 2006 / 93 Minutes

A timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all, ¡Salud!looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls ‘one of the world’s best health systems.’ From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud! hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba -- now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA. Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health—and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birth right.

Against the alarming backdrop of the global health crisis and deteriorating public health systems in even the richest nations, ¡Salud! tells the little-known story of Cuba: a poor country overcoming its lack of resources to provide universal health care and help other developing nations do the same.

A feature documentary, ¡Salud! is directed by Academy Award nominee Connie Field and co-produced by Gail Reed. The film spans three continents to look at the philosophy and health professionals placing Cuba on the map in the worldwide movement to make health care a global birthright. Today, Cubans are among the world’s healthiest people, despite the island’s poverty. Cuba’s volunteer corps now posts 28,000 health professionals in 68 countries; and Cuban medical schools will graduate an unprecedented 100,000 new doctors from developing countries over the next decade.

The film’s cameras reach into The Gambia, rural South Africa, coastal villages of Honduras and river settlements in the Amazon, where a Cuban is often the first doctor a poor community has ever seen. In some nations they staff entire health systems. In all, they take with them the experience and philosophy of their own community-oriented, preventive and universal health care model fundamentally at odds with a global wave of healthcare privatization.

¡Salud! questions what propels Cuban doctors to serve where most others won’t, and grapples with the tensions their presence sometimes provokes.

Special Guest Facilitator: Robert Rattle

Robert Rattle conducts research projects on sustainable consumption and provides services as a sustainable development consultant/coach for various government and environmental agencies and organizations.

You can contact Robert Rattle at rattlestake@yahoo.ca or check out his web site at http://www.ncf.ca/~at758

Rattle's Take columns are also archived online at www.saultthisweek.com

Directed by
Connie Field

Produced by
Peter G. Bourne .... executive producer
Connie Field .... producer
Jennifer Ho .... associate producer
C. William Keck .... executive producer
Gail Reed .... executive producer

Cinematography by
Vicente Franco

Film Editing by
Rhonda Collins

Sound Department
James Lebrecht .... sound mixer
Dan Olmsted .... sound mixer
Gregory Scharpen.... sound designer
Patti Tauscher .... sound mixer

Editorial Department
Sage Brucia .... post-production assistant
Melissa Elbirt .... assistant editor

Other crew
Patricia Juarez Giordano .... assistant to producer

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