Behind the Screens Panel Gets Under Our Skin

Witness the wild success of documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth: Audiences are in fact compelled by films that create awareness in areas that were previously void of strong advocacy campaigns.

Under Our Skin creator and director Andy Abrahams Wilson told the audience at Sunday night's Behind the Screens panel discussion that he created his documentary (with a single camera, over the course of four years) because, after watching Lyme disease strike his twin sister and a close friend, he learned there was a "real need for people to have their story told." This was explicitly confirmed after he put the word of his film out in the blogosphere and received literally hundreds of replies. Many of these people had been misdiagnosed with mental disorders, a chronic problem in the medical community due to lack of awareness, research, and education, Abrahams said. While filming his subjects' sometimes frightening symptoms, he said he deliberately chose not to film their neuropsychotic conditions in order to present this disease as valid and potentially life-threatening—a standpoint over which the medical community is still torn.

Interestingly, yet not completely without precedent, the film seemed also to strike fear into some members of the audience, as the Q+A session quickly morphed into a heated discussion about Lyme disease prevention. Wilson was quick to insert that while the immediate reaction to viewing these subjects, who spend the majority of the film crippled and in pain, may be to fear the nature that breeds the blood-sucking ticks who transmit Lyme disease. But said he did not create this documentary with the intentions of teaching the public how to prevent the disease. Instead, he set out on an awareness campaign to let the public begin to learn not only about the pain associated with Lyme disease but also about the bureaucracy surrounding treatment. Considering there are somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 cases of Lyme disease reported in the United States each year (and many, many more that are never properly diagnosed), according to Wilson, he already has a built-in audience for his cause.

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