Terry Dagradi/Photo and Design, Yale University
Dr. Gretchen Berland and Michael Otremba
A film by 2012 Yale School of Medicine graduate Michael Otremba has been named “best documentary feature” at the New York Los Angeles International Film Festival. The film, Twero: The Road to Health, examines the problems Uganda has providing health care to its citizens.
Reached by telephone in Los Angeles, where his film is scheduled to be screened on Tuesday, Otremba said the Ugandan government’s failure to live up to its health-care funding commitments has resulted, in part, in some physicians violating one set of rights to ensure another.
As pointed out in Yale Medicine, a Yale School of Medicine alumni publication, Otremba’s film “explores the detention of Ugandan patients unable to pay their bills.”
Otremba, a postdoctoral associate in the Yale School of Medicine’s surgery department, made the film because he wanted to tell a story and, in doing so, to make a difference in people’s lives. The model for Twero: The Road to Health, he said, was Dr. Gretchen Berland’s documentary Rolling, which investigates the lives of the wheelchair-bound. Berland, who’s a member of the Yale School of Medicine faculty, provided guidance to Otremba — at his request — as he put together his documentary film.
While filmmaking was a new experience for Otremba, creating art was not. In 2008, at the end of his first year at the Yale School of Medicine, Otremba organized Recovering the Anatomy Lab, a cathartic project in which he and his classmates covered operating tables in pink fabric, in a nod to the works of Christo and (the late) Jeanne-Claude.
Otremba, who dropped out of high school to become a writer like his brothers, ended up following the same career path as his father, a physician. At the Yale School of Medicine, having received his undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota, Otremba said he led a theater group and worked on a World AIDS Day installation at the Medical Historical Library.
In his final year in the medical program, Otremba took a creative approach to research work, traveling to Uganda, where he’d twice before spent time, to make Twero: The Road to Health.
Otremba’s first trip to the East African nation was in 2007, when, through the University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Center, he did an internship with the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children, a chapter of which he’d started at the university.
In the summer between his first and second years at Yale, on a research fellowship through the university’s law and medical schools, Otremba spent three months at the Uganda Human Rights Commission studying the Ministry of Health’s newly established human-rights desk.
Upon returning to Yale, Otremba found that he couldn’t offer a very clear picture of what the establishment of that office meant for Ugandan citizens.
Talking about Twero: The Road to Health and what he learned making the film, Otremba said Uganda’s health-care problems are the result, in broad terms, of the above-mentioned funding shortfall, corruption, and a lack of systems and infrastructure.
“Two-thirds of Ugandans live on less than $2 a day,” Otremba said.
By comparison, malaria medications, to which Ugandans should have free access at government clinics, cost $3 through private pharmacies. Oftentimes, Otremba explained, clinics don’t have the medications on-hand because of the government’s failings.
When an individual needs to see a doctor, the problems worsen.
“It’s really unethical to think about the money first,” Otremba said he was told by one doctor.
Some doctors end up detaining patients until their bills are paid.
Asked what can be done to begin fixing these problems, Otremba asked, rhetorically, “How did we end debtors’ prisons in the past?”
Twero: The Road to Health will be screened on Nov. 5 at 6:10 p.m. in Room 129 at the Yale Law School.