Medicine Box:
Health Care and the New Americans

a work-in-progress documentary

Every week, more than 1500 new refugees and asylum seekers arrive in the United States. Russian, Somali, Cambodian, Afghan, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Haitian, Iranian, Hmong, Indonesian.... The differing medical and social needs of these diverse groups are often minimized or misunderstood. The result? Poor health care for new arrivals, and more expenses for our health care system.

Many new arrivals conceptualize health and disease in ways unfamiliar to American providers, and they struggle while learning to trust their caregivers.

Dedicated members of the medical community are slowly coming to grips with these realities. With this documentary, we will explore how Western medicine and Eastern cultures are learning to coexist in middle America. The end result will be an hour-long documentary – one that sheds new light on the obstacles facing our growing communities of New Americans, and on our health care system as it copes with an influx of people with truly unique medical needs.

Project Update (January 2007):

[For a more recent project update, click here.]

We've been working for over a year now and we have nearly 75 hours worth of footage. The project has taken me from the Twin Cities to Washington DC, Toronto, Atlanta, and Miami. We've survived run-ins with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport police and even the State Department. I've learned so much in the making of this film, and if all my tapes caught fire today, I'd still come away a better person. My life has been touched by so many amazing people with tales of survival and selflessness. (Don't worry about the fire, however. I do make back-up tapes.)

It is hard to tell when making a documentary with such wide-reaching subject matter, but I suspect we're about halfway done collecting footage. That would suggest we're still at least a year from diving fulltime into post-production. Fundraising is ongoing, as is the logging of the footage we've shot so far.

Last summer, we created two different cuts of what we're calling an "illustrative sequence" – a more informal version of a trailer – for fundraising purposes and they are available for viewing above. It is just a small sample of the kind of footage we've been able to compile. Our first 25 hours culled down to 10 minutes. The video sample's purpose is not to present the narrative arc of our film, nor to cover all the ground that we hope to cover in the final film, but to simply give the flavor of the project. (Click on the links in the upper right of this page to see the video.)

- Producer-Director Chris Newberry

If you have any questions or comments about this project, please contact Chris Newberry.