Going rate for a kidney

Film Date: Wednesday May 11, 6:30 PM
Where: Vancity Theatre

The personal cost of the international trade in organs comes home in Rama Rau’s startling new film — very close to home actually; the city of Nanaimo, where a single mother named Sandra lives with her teenage daughter.
Sandra’s kidneys are failing; every day she must undergo multiple dialysis treatments if she wants to live.
Across the world in Chennai, India, Hema, a mother of two, is faced with her own difficult choice. With mounting debts, Hema can sell her kidney to a broker for $2,500. Hema joins a growing number of people who have made the decision to sell their body parts, often to people from the West.
In one scene after another, both women and men display the surgical scars on their torsos, a lasting physical indicator of the depth of their poverty and desperation.
The connection between these two very different women, brought together via the booming (albeit illegal) international trade in human organs, provides the impetus for the film. It also shines a critical eye on the moral and deeply personal process of decision-making.
As her own mother and daughter push Sandra to consider buying a kidney, time is running out. Already on a waiting list for five years, the honeymoon period for Sandra’s particular type of dialysis is over, and her body is beginning to break down.
But for Sandra to gain a kidney, another woman will be forced to lose one.
As Sandra wrestles with her own sense of right and wrong, the issue of ethics and economics and the personal price paid for morality is revealed when Sandra and her family travel to India to get the other side of the story.
The director Rama Rau will be in attendance.