This film looks at the success in overcoming a crippling disease that has besieged Nigeria, and large parts of Africa for decades. Onchocerciasis, commonly known as river blindness causes unbearable itching and ultimately blindness to the point where river-side communities were abandoned.

Thanks to the dedication of people like Nasarawa State Coordinator for Neglected Tropical Diseases, Jacob Righain, the support of NGO partners The Carter Center and donation of the treating drug Mectizan by Merck & Co., local communities have been empowered to break the transmission of river blindness and create a platform for future disease interventions.

Filmed just before the COVID-19 lockdown kicked in, we worked with a talented Nigerian crew to get right to the heart of the story. We edited back in the UK and created a bespoke soundtrack to help transport the viewer deeper into the world of neglected tropical diseases.

It forms part of a wider suite of films used in different ways that have told the Mectizan Donation Program story over the years, collaborating with multiple global partners from the Nigerian Ministry of Health and local government, to Sightsavers, the Carter Center and other key players in the game to get full engagement from the offset.

Cloud9Media have been working within global health for more than a decade. This showcase brings together dozens of films that raise awareness for NTDs from projects spanning the globe.

To create video and photographic coverage for TV presenter Charlie Webster’s trip for the Malaria Must Die campaign, our Cloud9Media team spent a busy action-packed week in Western Uganda. In the process, Charlie saw with her own eyes how malaria impacts local communities, and came to terms with a fatal disease that she caught herself when cycling to the Rio Olympics in 2016 on a charity fundraising drive.

At the forefront of the fight against malaria, organisations like Malaria No More have always taken a bold controversial approach to their messaging to help it resonate with Western audiences. The aim of their campaigns is to bring home the reality that malaria is not something that happens elsewhere, but is affecting people everywhere. Increasingly, thanks to climate change, this includes areas of the world where malaria was once unheard of.

Using archival shots taken from Charlie’s broadcast career and stills of her hospitalisation, our team combined these with our own footage to show the background of Charlie’s journey. The result is a short film that captured the challenges she and other sufferers of malaria face, and how there is hope for the elimination of malaria.