The Research Cartel

From the writer of ’The Digger’ comes an original feature-length documentary called The Research Cartel. The film will cover what has happened this past two years with the supression of unprofitable treatments, how long this kind of thing has been going on, and how ‘normal’ the practice is. How researchers are being paid by the industry, how this affects our knowledge. It will look at how researchers and regulators get jobs in pharmaceutical companies, how novel drugs are used instead of safe generic ones, and of course, how this has a massive impact on patient safety.

The film will also explore countries which have ‘gone their own way’ and see if a terrible disaster has befallen those countries, or of something different happened there. Are there things we can learn from countries that have managed to hold pharmaceutical companies to account?

The film will be produced and directed by BAFTA award winning Phil Harper, who is currently writing and curating The Digger, a publication which has uncovered the network of special interests which has kept life saving treatments away from patients so that profits could continue to roll in.

For those supporting the film, there are tiered co-production credits. The distribution of the film will be decentralised; those that contribute to the production can host screenings of the final film and recoup their contribution via ticket sales. After recouping, ticket sales are split 50/50. Distributing the film this way means screenings can happen all over the world, and people can be renumerated for their work in hosting a screening and developing the audience.

Why would we distribute it in this manner? Because Netflix are unlikely to pick this film up until it’s already gained some traction. Other broadcasters are almost certain to not to run with a film like this. We can’t depend on these traditional avenues to gain our audience, we’ll have to build it ourselves. Facilitating all of this, building an audience through real life and online screenings, requires work, and therefore budget. There’s no use in making a film like this if we can’t bring eyeballs to it, so your support will be put toward both the production and distribution costs of the film.

As well as this mirror.xyz fundraiser, there are other traditional crowdfunders. The reason I wanted to use crypto is because there’s a real danger that the funds for a film like this could be frozen or censored. We’ve seen that throughout the past two years. By using crypto, there’s a lesser chance that such funds can be frozen. The ‘tiered’ NFT tokens are simply demonstrations that you were really funders. When it comes to screening the film, those tokens may be of use. However, as of now, please see this mirror page purely as a fundraiser collecting ETH.