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Passionate producer and director Mahmood Al-Yousif is submitting his Thinking Pink documentary to film festivals across the globe to promote the society and its success on a larger scale in hopes of encouraging others to follow suit, writes Mai Al Khatib-Camille.
The documentary, which is about an hour long, will be showcased in a private viewing at Beit Al Quran today and will be available to the public after it makes its rounds at the festival circuit.
Mahmood said: “The documentary will get a life of its own. I’m going to submit it to quite a number of film festivals in the name of the society and hopefully it will gain more viewership. Then, once the festival circuit is over, which is normally after one year of the launch date, it goes into a public viewing and I hope it will be hosted on a public platform and distributed to the local and international television channels to screen.
“As a filmmaker, I’ve done the job of telling the story from my perspective. That can be taken further now and the message can be amplified by more and more viewership.
“I don’t care about whatever monetary gain it might receive or donations it can generate. If it can save one single person’s life or keep a family together by encouraging and inspiring women to go and get themselves screened, I’ve done my job.”
Apparently, the documentary is “not a fly on the wall kind of thing”. Aside from featuring the lovely ladies and their efforts, he also wanted to show how people can emulate success without being selfish about it.
“I did an initial interview with Jules and Tahera,” he explained. “It’s not a corporate film that is packaged in a documentary. It’s not a ‘hey look how great these people are’. I wanted to specifically show the story through the eyes of the benefactors and supporters as well. I’ve shown them on the screen with sometimes tears in their eyes as they shared how the donation affected them.
“I also showed how the efforts being made are transferred back into the community and to the women who are in desperate states at about 10pm while they are showering and feeling that they have a lump. Can you imagine what and how that would feel? Who do you turn to? What do you do especially if you are a foreigner in a foreign land?
“The word cancer cannot be more negative. There is a published phone number that these ladies man 24/7 and they can calm that person down and actually put their energy into thinking positive. They also arrange for these women to see specialised doctors and to make use of the facility they provide in Salmaniya Medical Complex. They have also created a complete guideline, a book about how physicians should treat, discover and progress patients with breast cancer.”
The Breast Cancer Clinical Guideline was formed by Julie, Tahera and Professor Zbys Fedorowicz, a British national who graduated from the Royal Dental Hospital of London in 1971. He has had postings in Holland and South Africa and 35 years’ experience in the Middle East.
The guideline was sanctioned by the Supreme Council of Health and its key objective has been to provide a robustly-developed, high-quality, reliable, internationally-recognised compliant resource which can be used by both clinicians and patients for shared decision-making in the management of the condition. CEO of the Supreme Council of Health, Shaikh Dr Mohammed bin Abdulla Al Khalifa, agreed to the development of the guideline under his umbrella and that of the National Health Regulatory Authority (NHRA). It was funded by the charity and he agreed to the process. It lasted 18 months.
Mahmood said: “Just like Jules and Tahera, I wanted to inspire others to get up and do something about it. Individuals can make changes within a community if they throw away the shackles of expectations and negativity and focus on a single goal. Anybody with a cause that is bigger and more noble than themselves will be able to do it regardless of where they are anywhere in the world.
“I wanted to show that success story and offer a template through the film that people and societies elsewhere can actually emulate quite successfully. That’s the story of the film – the trials, the tribulations, the determination, the persistence, the honesty, the tears, the blood, the sweat the attempts, the failures a swell as the successes that Think Pink has achieved for the past 15 since they first started.”
Other milestones included the funding of a pilot project by Fatan Al Hannan, a local Bahraini researcher who published a post finding a genetic mutation that is significant to the national population. Think Pink also developed, from scratch, the first Arabic and English mobile application for free download and compatible on all devices. The free mobile application is called iCheck (Think Pink Bahrain).
The ladies also raised funds and installed a BD499,900 1.5 T digital MRI at Salmanyia Medical Complex’s Radiography Department, educated a total of five Bahraini nurses in a fully-funded two year programme as well as armed 12 Bahraini physiotherapists with international certification of lymphedema therapy at Klose clinic in Germany with flights and accommodation and transfer paid.
The society also had a collaborative agreement with BioLab to fund nationals and expatriates suspected by their healthcare teams to be BRCA1/ BRCA2 positive, along with psychological support if found positive.
Julie said: “More than $2.8 million has gone into the development of the mobile application, the education of Bahraini nationals in health care, specifically breast cancer, for international conferences of these doctors, nurses and physios, and 120 thousand dinars was directed to the 2005 National Mammography Drive under the Bahrain Cancer Society. None of the board or volunteers or executives, pre or past, would take a wage from these donations. One hundred per cent of all funds go towards the charity.”
Find out more about the film by visiting www.arabivideo.me as well as following @thinkpinkbahrain on Instagram.
