Stigma
Leprosy still infects roughly 200,000 people a year, yet most of the world treats it as a medieval disease that vanished long ago. Filmmakers Jeff Johns and Ryan Lougridge travel through India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam asking why a curable illness remains so hard to eradicate, and the answer they keep running into is stigma rather than biology. They sit down with WHO doctors and aid workers who explain the medical realities of treatment and relapse, then visit leprosy colonies where residents describe being cast out by their own families and communities, sometimes decades after they were cured. The film moves between clinical settings and these colonies, letting the disconnect between medical fact and social fear speak for itself. Rather than a survey of symptoms and statistics, it is built around conversations with people still living inside the consequences of an ancient prejudice, in five countries where that prejudice looks different but produces the same isolation.