The movie that i am introducing today is Dying to survive, this film is based on a true story.
The film is about Yong Cheng who is an aphrodisiac seller, he’s dad is in the hospital and need money for surgery. Then Cheng became the exclusive agent for the Indian Glivec. The original Glivec was developed Novartis, the medicine works for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia and was priced 40000 RMB which is apparently very expensive for the patients who suffer from CML and they need to take the medicine on a daily basis. The indian Glivec was priced much lower and affordable, the India government used the Compulsory drug Licensing and manufactured the generic drug for the people who can not afford the original Glivec. Cheng had made a fortune by smuggling drugs from India. He has a small group of four who works for him, a priest who can speak english, Lv who is a CML patient and HuangMao who is also a patient, lastly Sihui whose daughter is a CML patient. There’s also another people who are selling generic drugs Zhang, however his drug does not work and can even cause danger to the patients. As the story develop, Cheng was arrested and sentenced a fixed-term imprisonment.
In reality, the actual story is actually pretty similar, Yong Lu is the prototype of Cheng. He is a CML patient himself, unlike the movie character, he understand how difficult it is for patient to survive. In order to survive, he lost everything, went through chemo and later discovered the Indian Glivec, he took the medicine for around two months and found out that the medicine does work and shared his experience. After this, a lot of patient who came up to him for help. In 2013, he was arrested for smuggling drugs, but eventually he was released since the People’s Procuratorate not to initiate a prosecution.
The movie showed how human are struggling and dying to survive. Sihui, her daughter suffers from CML and her husband abandoned them, in order to survive, she dance in the nightclub and got molested sometimes. She does not have a choice. Cheng’s initial thought was to earn enough money for his dad’s surgery and live a better life, but in the end he gave up on everything to help the patient and run at a loss. Lv died eventually, he said in the movie that whenever he looks at his son, he’s son gave him hope but in the end before he ended his own life, his last glimpse was his son as well but there’s no hope anymore. The movie reminds me of my dad a lot, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2019, he went through various therapy, the pain almost made him to give up on himself. He has changed a lot, to the point that when i got back to China, i didn’t even recognize my own father. It’s like his bones were wrapped by a thin layer of skin, it felt like all the fat muscle and water had left his body, he can’t eat and can’t even walk. But he’s lucky, my family could afford him to experience less pain and prolong his life-span to the greatest extent, he was put into target therapy which does not have that much side effect as chemo therapy does. Last year, he had autologous stem cell transplantation and he’s so much better now. I remember one of the patient that lived in the same room with my dad, i saw his pain in my own eyes and he eventually stopped the chemo because he can not take it any more that he was even struggling to open his eyes to look at me.
In the movie, there’s one line that hurts me the most is ‘ I’ve realize that there is only one kind of illness, poverty and you can’t help with it’. But in the movie, the company who set the price so high, they are not doing wrong, the cost for them to develop such drug is insanely high. Cheng as well, he is doing this for his father and for the patients in the end. And the police, they stick to justice and the patients who buy the generic drugs they are just trying to live. Obviously every one is right, they are just dying to survive. But i think it’s going to be better, since the anticancer drugs are now included in the medical insurance, there are still more thing can be improve and i think it will. And i highly recommend the movie, and it soon became the one of the top-grossing films of the year when it released in 2018.
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