Kickstarter

Synopsis
Haydom Lutheran Hospital is one of the few hospitals in Tanzania. It is a donation/volunteer based hospital which serves over a million people of central Tanzania, currently set to lose funding in 2014. We are raising funds for a documentary film about the hospital which will be used to raise awareness and encourage countries and corporations to fund the future of the hospital.

What is LIFE WITHOUT CARE?
Life Without Care is a documentary film project centered on Haydom hospital in remote central Tanzania, 200 miles from Arusha, the nearest large town. For 60 years, a mostly volunteer medical staff has provided care to over a million people throughout the region with a skeleton crew and overwhelming need. The people relying on the hospital include the Hadza tribe, one of the oldest living cultures on earth, and the last full-time hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa. Patients travel for days with their entire families to receive care, which is provided free to those who cannot afford it.

In 2014, Haydom’s major source of outside funding is going to be cut, leaving the hospital unable to operate, and the million people who rely on it will lose access to anything but rudimentary medical care. In this moment of crisis, there are stories that need to be told and voices that need to be heard: the story of the doctors who give up everything to work in one of the poorest and most isolated regions of the planet, and the voices of the people who rely on that care - and face its imminent loss.


About the Team
Photographer Michal Venera first visited Haydom last year, and brought back beautiful footage and photographs of the hospital, its patients, and its work. In order to tell its story in full, he plans to return to the hospital with Norbert, a surgeon who, along with his physician wife, has given the last four years of his life volunteering in Africa, and documentary filmmaker Daniel Byers of Skyship Films.

Telling Haydom’s story means telling the stories of the people of Tanzania, reaching out into extremely remote communities to find the voices of those whose lives have been changed by the hospital’s work, and the patients who will be directly impacted by its disappearance. We hope through this film to let the many people who rely on the hospital - doctors, staff, and patients alike - to demonstrate how essential it is to the region. And who knows, maybe we can turn some heads and change some hearts, and keep the place alive.

Michal's photography can be seen at www.michalvenera.com

Here are some of his prints available as rewards:

Daniel's past documentary work can be seen at www.skyshipfilms.com

Why We Need Money
Haydom is extremely remote, and accessing it in the first place will mean a long and difficult journey - travel by air, jeep, and foot. In addition to our ground costs for the time spent at the Hospital, we'll also be traveling long distances to remote villages to speak to people and gather their stories.

While we are donating our own gear and time to the production, we'll need to make sure we're properly outfitted to shoot in an environment as harsh as the Tanzanian desert, which means special considerations for both personal and photographic gear.

In addition, the cost of creating the film from the material we gather will be considerable, and we want to be able to give it all the resources it needs to be great: professional editing, sound mixing, color, and graphics, as well as an original score. We also want to use the music of local artists, and be able to compensate them for their contributions.

How Kickstarter Works
Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing funding platform, which means we either make our total goal for this project, or we get nothing at all. That means that if we don't raise enough to meet our goal for the project, you won't get charged for your donation. Depending how much you decide to give (and every bit helps!), you'll also get one of the cool rewards listed to the right of this page.

Donating is easy - just click one of the rewards to your right, and pledge via credit card through Amazon.com's secure server (Kickstarter uses Amazon.com to do it's payments as it's extremely well-known and secure.) We'll keep you posted with new updates (one of the tabs at the top), and you can also monitor our progress towards reaching our goal and see who else has been donating. Thanks so much for your support!

Thank you for your support!
Through film festivals, television broadcast, and private and public screenings, we hope to raise awareness for this devastating event in the lives of so many people. With your help, we can create a powerful tool that can not only be used to give these people hope, but also empower an effort to save Haydom hospital.