Mary & Martha & Malaria

A British film-maker explains the challenge that malaria posed him – and his response.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I became a little obsessed with malaria. I think it was in a conversation with the economist Jeffrey Sachs who wrote the brilliant book ‘The End of Poverty’ and has a slightly controversial haircut. He talked about malaria being this “low-hanging fruit” – a disease that was entirely preventable and curable but was killing a million people a year, most of them children.

Not long after, I saw an extraordinary documentary called “Fever Road”. It was mainly set in a village in Kenya where every single summer a chunky percentage of the children inevitably died of malaria. They had ‘malaria month’. Every year. Just like that. If you take my son Charlie’s class – that’s Charlie himself, Barney and Sam gone this year. Kassim, Rosie and Jimmy, who plays in goal, next year. But basically the documentary had the same message – a preventable, curable disease, was killing close to a million children a year.

I took this back to Comic Relief, the organisation we set up in 1985 to bring comedians together to make the British public laugh while they raised money for those in desperate need. The more we looked at it, the more malaria seemed like the perfect example of what we’d always claimed, that it really is possible for a small amount of money to change and save the lives of the people we serve in Africa. A mosquito net costs €6, the rapid testing kit costs 50 euro cents, the emergency drugs cost €1.40.

Comic Relief raises money through two key events: Red Nose Day and Sport Relief, which alternate each March. The key to the success of these fundraising efforts is not the line-up of A-list UK comedians and sportspeople that help to raise money, but rather the fact that millions of ordinary British citizens get involved to ‘do something funny for money’ for Red Nose Day or raise sponsorship money through Sport Relief. After we discovered how a little money could save lives , we started making films about malaria. Singers Gary Barlow and Cheryl Cole, and DJ Chris Moyles were part of a group of British celebrities who climbed up Kilimanjaro in 2009, raising enough money to buy over a million nets in the process. They also made short documentary films about malaria on the night. They were terrible, terrible things to work on. It soon became clear that if we sent one of our presenters to certain African hospitals, they would be absolutely certain to see children dying of malaria.

In one particularly memorable moment, Chris Moyles is watching a little boy recovering in the hospital and he slips out for a cigarette. As he leans against the hospital wall, he sees a man putting a small wrapped bundle into the back of his car. It’s his child. His Charlie. Cigarette over, Chris goes back to see how the first child is getting on. But in the two minutes that he’s been outside, little Makebi has died. I’ve got another son called Spike. That’s Spike gone.

I started to get obsessed and really confused. In the UK, newspapers often concentrate for weeks on the death of one child– but here were a million children, dying every year, and nothing in the papers. Billions of pounds spent on wars, with uncertain outcomes – but not enough money put aside to fight a curable, preventable disease where there is actually a plan, a blueprint for getting the deaths down to nearly zero – yet, it is never at the top of anyone’s agenda.

It is hard to forget the look on actor David Tennant’s face on Red Nose Day 2011 when he wanders around Mbale Hospital in Uganda with a list of children’s names – reading out what disease they’ve got – “Aswena – malaria, Stephen – malaria, Peter, Shikebu, another Peter – all with malaria. Gracious – diabetes, caused by malaria.” Then David turns to the camera and talks about the people who do not give money on Red Nose Night and begs the viewers not to be “that person”.

That is how I felt: was I going to be a writer who knew about this stuff intimately and yet continue to write fictional films usually featuring weddings? And that is why I wrote “Mary and Martha”, which is on television in Belgium on 25 and 26 April.

The film is 90 minutes long, and was directed by a giant of an Australian director, Phillip Noyce, who made a few of my favourite films, in particular “Rabbit-proof fence” and “Dead calm”. It i about two women – an American, Mary, acted by the wonderful Hilary Swank, and the quintessential British actress Brenda Blethyn, playing Martha. Both of them start the movie with no connection to malaria. Both of them end the movie utterly obsessed and passionate about the issue, having been personally and terribly affected by it. The film is really about being a parent, and about, as Brenda’s character says, the question of “What can a mother without a child really do?” What they decide to do is to find out about malaria, and do whatever they can to fight against this terrible killing machine.

There is a speech that Mary’s father, a conservative American, makes towards the end of the film, which I hope it is okay if I re-produce here: “Did you know that if you take every single person killed in a terrorist act around the world in the last 20 years – and add to that every life that’s been lost in the Middle East since the Six Day War in ‘67 – and add to that every single American life we lost in Vietnam and Korea – and every single other military conflict America’s been involved in since then, Iraq, Afghanistan… If you take all those lives – that we’d all have given so much to save – you’ve still got to multiply them by two to get to the number of kids who die of malaria every single year.”

And Mary and Martha, two very ordinary women who sorrow makes extraordinary, try to do something about that.

I don’t know what the film will achieve – I just hope that people who watch it will enjoy it in that way that sad things can be enjoyable – and maybe, some of you who do will find that you want to do something to save one life, or be part of the movement that makes sure that in our lifetime we save millions and millions and millions of children’s lives, unnecessarily lost. Here in Brussels, the European Commission, the world’s second-largest aid donor, will take big decisions this year on how it spends its money over the next seven years. Spending even a tiny proportion of that budget on fighting malaria could make a huge difference. The number dying of malaria each year now has gone down to around 650,000. This amazing progress shows the battle can be won. But there is a tragically long way to go. The faster we get there, the better.

Richard Curtis’s credits as a screenwriter and film director include “Four weddings and a funeral”, “Bridget Jones’s diary”, “Notting Hill” and “Love actually”. “Mary & Martha” will be shown in Belgium on Vitaya on 25 April at 21.05 and on Plug RTL on 26 April at 20.40. Today, 25 April, is World Malaria Day.

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