We Want You to Live: Liberia's Fight Against Ebola dir. by Carl Gierstorfer (review)

In the late night hours of Sunday, March 24, 2014, Liberia's Minister of Health and Social Welfare confirmed the first two cases of Ebola in his country. By the end of that year, 4,810 Liberians had died from the highly infectious and often fatal disease. Indeed, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa had a devastating impact on Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea (the three worst affected countries in Africa), where 11,323 people died out of 28,646 cases, according to World Health Organization figures.

At the height of the outbreak, news organizations were quick to respond, churning out story after story and often focusing on the dire effect the outbreak might ultimately have on the West. In fact, to many Western news outlets the Ebola outbreak was a story about Africa's failure to contain the highly contagious pathogen. Exemplary of this kind of journalism was an extended report in November 2014 by the award-winning CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes entitled "The Ebola Hot Zone." The report was concerned with life in one Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) at the peak of the outbreak in Liberia. However, the report paid little or no attention to the Liberians themselves, opting instead to examine Western (U.S. in particular) efforts to tame the disease and "save" the Africans. In fact, those few Africans who actually appeared in the report were either filmed from behind quarantine barriers or hidden behind masks, gloves, and hazmat suits, lending them an "otherworldly" appearance. The 60 Minutes report was fairly representative of how much of the world outside of Africa perceived the Ebola crisis: yet another example of the African "other" in need of "saving"; of misery, disease, and death in Africa with little or no regard to the West's legacy of exploitation in Africa—human, natural resource, or otherwise. Much of the West's coverage of the 2014 outbreak was reminiscent of the lackluster 1995 film Outbreak (directed by Wolfgang Peterson), which depicted the social impact of an Ebola-like virus from Africa on a small U.S. community.

In contrast to Outbreak and the more recent Western media coverage of Ebola, the German journalist and videographer Carl Gierstorfer's We Want You to Live: Liberia's Fight Against Ebola (aired in the United States as In Ebola's Wake) offers a nuanced and insightful view into the Ebola crisis as experienced by the small Liberian community of Taylor Town in late 2014. The film examines the larger ramifications of Ebola on Liberia's labor and healthcare sectors as well as the social psyche. It succinctly surveys the economic, sociological, and psychological scars that Liberia will continue to confront outside of the Western media's gaze, which has now largely turned its attention elsewhere (to Syria, Brexit, the U.S. election, and so on). And it reveals, for example, how other medical crises like malaria, tuberculosis, or at-risk pregnancies became "death sentences" because many hospitals and clinics were closed—shown shuttered in the film—to protect healthcare workers during the Ebola outbreak.

Central to Gierstorfer's film is the socio-psychological stigmatization that many Ebola survivors, such as Stanley Juah, faced in the wake of the disease. Stanley, we learn through on-camera and subtitled interviews, became a pariah in his home village of Taylor Town for having defied a quarantine order by bringing his son, suspected of having Ebola, into the village where twenty-six people eventually fell ill and fourteen died. The legacy of those deaths haunts Stanley and the villagers alike. Furthermore, the film depicts how Taylor Town struggled with economic hardship. Angry villagers are shown in the film confronting Stanley at a Town Hall–style meeting, where he is held responsible for the town's economic woes after the season's crop harvest withered while many of Taylor Town's farm laborers either...