Tales from the Organ Trade Hot Docs Press Summary

Tales From the Organ Trade North American Premiere – April 28th Hot Docs International Documentary Festival GAT PR Press Summary

Interviews completed

Hot Docs Press Conference CHCH TV – The Watchlist

CBC Radio-­‐Canada

National Post

Hot Docs Live

During Festival

CTV National News

The Globe and Mail

CBC Radio – The Current

Independent Film Channel

Toronto Star – News

Toronto Star – Lifestyle

POV Magazine

Twitch Film

OpenCanada.org

CBC (Radio Canada) – Il n’y a pas deux matins pareils

Tales from the Organ Trade: Ric Esther Bienstock The Current

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/04/29/tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐ric-­‐esther-­‐bienstock/

If you have believed the issue of selling kidneys is Black and White, come with us into the Grey Zone. Our project Line in the Sand .. Dilemmas that Define Us explores the selling of kidneys, the quest for donors and the need for solutions. We hear from filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock whose documentary "Tales From the Organ Trade" tracks those who sell, those who broker, the surgeons, the patients, those who wait for donors and those who are deeply conflicted.

"There is a growing network of organ trade throughout the world. And unfortunately the source of these organs are the indigent the poor the vulnerable and the persons who want this are rich wealthy nations who can pay a hundred thousand for a

kidney and they are harvesting these organs." -­‐ Jonathan Ratel, the Canadian lead prosecutor on a high profile organ trafficking case in Kosovo, on how the poor are exploited horrifically by the trade in human organs.

In a new documentary, director Ric Esther Bienstock discovers a more complex story.

From the slums of Manila, to the peaks of Denver, Tales from the Organ Trade tells the story of people desperate to buy organs and people desperate to sell.

As part of our project Line in The Sand exploring the ethical dilemmas that define us, we explore the questions and issues of paying for organs.

Ric Esther Bienstock is the Toronto director of Tales from the Organ Trade. The film premiered in North America at Toronto's Hot Docs film festival last night, and screens again today and Thursday.

This segment was produced by The Current's Josh Bloch.

Want to add your thoughts? Tweet us @thecurrentcbc. Find us on Facebook.

Or email us from our website. And if you missed anything on The Current, grab a podcast.

Tales from the Organ Trade investigates the black market of organ trafficking Barbara Turnbull

http://www.thestar.com/life/2013/04/26/tales_from_the_organ_trade_investigates_the_black_market_ of_organ_trafficking.html

Should people be allowed to sell their organs?

That question lingers in Tales from the Organ Trade , a documentary by Toronto’s multiple award-­‐winning filmmaker Ric Bienstock, making its North American premiere at Hot Docs , April 28, 29 and May 2.

The film won Best Sign of the Times Doc Award from New Zealand's documentary festival, where it had its world premiere last week.

Narrated by David Cronenberg, it’s an unflinching look at international organ trafficking, capturing, for the first time, the point of view of all participants in one operation.

Kidney disease is skyrocketing and transplant is the only way to survive for hundreds of thousands of people. With the desperately poor willing, and opportunistic surgeons able, there’s little hope of containing the spread, Bienstock says.

“The desperation to live is such a profound thing,” she says. “They want to believe they’re helping the donor. They have to rationalize, because they are not evil people.”

Globally it’s illegal to buy organs, a position Bienstock agreed with at first.

“I expected it to be a very black and white story when I set out,” she says. “Then I realized there was a lot of moral ambiguity.”

The film focuses on a trafficking ring run out of a Kosovo clinic, involving a Turkish surgeon, an Israeli facilitator and a Canadian prosecutor — and a Toronto man who purchases a kidney from a woman in Moldova.

Bienstock flew back and forth to Asia and Europe over four years, interviewing everyone involved, plus many others.

Most disquieting is the footage from the Philippines, where donating a kidney is almost a rite of passage for young men. Viewers may find themselves actually hoping one wannabe donor finds a buyer — a young man trying to lift his family out of poverty. Another young donor gets sick and discovers he has kidney disease, after it’s too late for him and the unknown recipient.

“There is coercion, organ harvesting and abuse. Almost without exception they get ripped off,” Bienstock says. “It was a weird scene for me when I met dozens and dozens of people who sold their kidneys.”

Bienstock confesses to feeling sadness, not relief, for the man whose kidney is rejected due to the film crew’s presence. “He really wanted to buy that house in the country and he’ll never be able to,” she says.

The Philippine men, primarily labourers, also have scars that take months to heal, and no follow-­‐up health care.

“That is why (some) are arguing for regulation,” Bienstock says. “It should be done properly. People who donate should be at the peak of their health.”

Toronto resident Mary Jo Vradis considers purchasing a kidney overseas in the film, then decides against it. “I wasn’t comfortable with the idea, because I knew how I’d be getting it,” she said in a phone interview. “Not only are you dependent on a complete foreign medical service, you’re taking a foreign kidney from somebody you don’t know. It’s a scary prospect.”

After waiting nine years on dialysis, Vradis received a kidney at St. Michael’s Hospital in 2010 from a deceased donor.

But it’s a chance Raul Fain, another Toronto resident, took. Although his transplant was a success, he faced public backlash when he was called to testify against the surgeon, dubbed “Dr. Frankenstein” by the media. Fain died eight months ago of unrelated health issues.

Some donors are content with their experience, Bienstock notes. She meets Fain’s donor in Moldova, a woman who shows only concern for her recipient and anger that the story became public.

“People are finding their way to these illegal operations when they are desperate enough,” Bienstock says. “We need to find a solution and we need to be open to think uncomfortable thoughts.”

Tales from the Organ Trade will air on Global TV in the fall.

Documentary maker takes on the ethical morass of the organ trade Michael Posner

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/documentary-­‐maker-­‐takes-­‐on-­‐the-­‐ethical-­‐morass-­‐of-­‐the-­‐ organ-­‐trade/article11387570/

Everyone knows the default position on human organ trafficking. Illegal in every country except Iran, it’s seen as a moral crime that ruthlessly exploits the penury of donors for the benefit of an affluent few.

Indeed, when Ric Esther Bienstock began work on her new documentary, Tales from the Organ Trade, that was her opinion as well.

But the further the Montrealer delved into the estimated $600-­‐million-­‐a-­‐year black market – a clandestine universe of impoverished organ donors, seedy brokers who coordinate transactions, mercenary surgeons and desperately ill patients who pay as much as $100,000 for a kidney – the more her ethical certitude waned.

By the end, Bienstock had come to a different viewpoint, if not a definitive conclusion: “If I knew that I was going to lose my house and, by selling a kidney, I could keep it and save someone else’s life, would I do it? I think I would.”

The thorny ethical dilemma crystallized for her during filming in the Philippines. At one point, she writes in her director’s notes, a young Filipino trying to sell his kidney lost his opportunity because the film crew’s cameras “spooked the broker he was working with.”

“Instead of feeling like we saved him from certain doom,” she said, “I felt like our interference took away the only opportunity he had to better his life. It was … a game-­‐changer for me. At that moment, I realized I wanted the film to take viewers on the same morally ambiguous journey I took.”

Her resulting 82-­‐minute film, narrated by David Cronenberg, opens at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival next week fresh from its world premiere in New Zealand, where it won best film in the Sign of the Times category.

Bienstock originally intended to study law. Recruited to assist with a documentary about AIDS in Africa, she fell in love with the medium. In the last 23 years, under the umbrella of Simcha Jacobovici’s Associated Producers in Toronto, she has directed films on subjects as diverse as Ebola, single mothers, magicians Penn and Teller, pornography and sex slaves.

Her interest in organ trafficking was initially piqued by a casual aside. She was interviewing a man in Ukraine whose wife had been kidnapped and sold into the sex trade – the subject of Bienstock’s last, Emmy-­‐winning documentary. “He said to me, “I’d do anything to get her back – even sell a kidney,’” she recalled. “And I thought, ‘what a weird thing to say.’”

Later, when she began her research, she discovered that other filmmakers had already explored the organ harvesting issue in depth, and wondered if she had anything new to say. But no documentary she’d seen had managed to assemble all the players involved in a single transaction – donor, recipient, doctors, broker. Bienstock set out to do just that, and, by spending most of her nearly $2-­‐million budget travelling to eight countries, succeeded.

The kidney operation she chose was conducted in Kosovo, in a clinic subsequently shuttered by authorities. It involved a Canadian recipient who dispersed $100,000 among the various parties: the donor from Moldava, a 40-­‐something woman who was paid $12,000; a notorious surgeon from Turkey dubbed “Dr. Frankenstein” in the press; the Israeli broker who facilitated the deal; and the American attorney who is still prosecuting alleged participants in an international organ harvesting ring in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital.

She tracked them down, one by one, and persuaded them to do on-­‐camera interviews.

Although there is organ trafficking in hearts, lungs and other human organs, kidneys are most in need. That’s the result of diabetes and the burden posed by dialysis. But with diabetes rates soaring, the demand is expected to grow exponentially. Even if Westerners began signing organ donation cards in record numbers, it would not satisfy the demand.

Those who participate in the operation are candid and unapologetic. As Zaki Shapira, one of the assisting surgeons in the Kosovo case, tells Bienstock, “People want to live, and nothing can change this … When I know I can save a man’s life, should I tell him I can’t do it because it’s illegal? How can I? Because it’s illegal, you have to die? What is this?”

American lobbyist Robby Berman, who also appears in the film, endorsed that view. The current system, he insisted, has it backward. “The broker who breaks the law and gets caught has saved hundreds of lives,” Berman noted. “I observe the law and I’ve let hundreds of people die. Who’s moral and who’s immoral?”

It’s legal to donate a kidney for no money, he said. Why should it be illegal to be paid for it?

The problem, of course, is that in the unregulated black market, donors are typically destitute and may either be taken advantage of financially – in the Philippines, young men earn as little as $1,000 for their kidneys – or may develop post-­‐surgical complications that leave them physically debilitated and without legal recourse.

“It’s just not simple,” Bienstock maintains. “Everyone is allowed to benefit. The surgeons, the nurses, the anaesthetist, the broker, the clinic – they’re all paid. The only one not allowed to benefit is the donor.”

“On the other hand,” she added, “once money is part of the equation, it’s no longer an ethically neutral transaction.”

She hopes Tales from the Organ Trade initiates a serious conversation.

“Sex slavery was an easy concept, “ she says. “There were no grey areas. Here, your viewpoint constantly changes. I’m not sure what the final answer is. I just hope the film makes people talk about the issue. I think that’s all you can do.”

Tales from the Organ Trade: Inside an illegal transplant operation Michael Posner http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/film-­‐reviews/tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐ inside-­‐an-­‐illegal-­‐transplant-­‐operation/article11529641/

Leave your preconceptions about human organ trafficking at the door. Emmy-­‐award-­‐ winning director Ric Esther Bienstock takes you on a ride that you won’t soon forget.

Though selling a kidney or any other organ is illegal everywhere but Iran, the law effectively condemns potential donors to a life of poverty and potential recipients to an early death. For the first time, meet the entire cast of a single illicit transplant operation – doctors, broker, donor and patient. 3/4 stars.

What’s hot at Hot Docs Brian D. Johnson

4. Tales From the Organ Trade

The fact that David Cronenberg narrates this penetrating inquiry into the black market traffic in human body parts may seem like a cruel joke, but this is a serious, superb and essential documentary that cuts through the sensationalism and hysteria surrounding its subject. It’s one of the most impressive, and incisive, works of investigative journalism I’ve seen onscreen in a long time. It’s also an virtuosic feat of story-­‐telling. Award-­‐winning Canadian filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock travel to four continents—shooting in Manila, Denver, Kosovo, Moldova, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, and yes, Toronto—to weave a suite of storylines about the most popular transaction in the illegal organ trade—the sale of kidneys. And at the heart of the film is a Rashomon-­‐like narrative, as Bienstock tracks down all the players involved in a single operation: the Canadian patient, his nephrologist, the Moldovian donor, the broker, the demonized doctor who performed operation in Kosovo (dubbed “Dr. Frankenstein” by the media), and the prosecutor who’s chasing him. The result is a nuanced, analytical portrait of the fierce ethical dilemmas on both sides of the issue, which Bienstock distills into cautious advocacy for a sensible solution.

The Anatomy of the Organ Trade Claire Schachter

http://opencanada.org/features/the-­‐think-­‐tank/interviews/the-­‐anatomy-­‐of-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade/

There is a roaring illegal trade in organs going on, with networks that extend from the suburbs of Toronto to the slums of Manila. But does the illegality make each person involved morally culpable to the same degree? We talked to the director of Tales from the Organ Trade, Ric Esther Bienstock, about what it was like to enter the morally ambiguous world of organ trafficking, and whether the stories she heard clarified or complicated her own beliefs about the ethics of selling or buying a chance at a better life.

What do you think is the most common misconception of who and what the black market organ trade involves?

The most common misconception in the world of organ trafficking is the idea that people wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing. This is an absolute urban myth. The more complex issue that I explore in the film is that of coercion. The media tends to report on this issue in very black and white terms, so the impression one gets is that organ sellers are forced to sell, or that their organs are “stolen.” Even in the Kosovo organ trafficking case that I investigate in the documentary, the people who sold their kidneys are characterized by the prosecution and the media as having been coerced. They are portrayed simply as victims.

I challenged the prosecutor as well as several bioethicists on this issue of coercion. I told them that I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens of organ sellers and each of them told me that they did this willingly. In fact, they were the ones seeking out the organ brokers. The prevailing view on this is that they are “coerced” by their own poverty and desperation. Of course that’s true. No one who isn’t desperate for cash will sell a kidney. But one of the questions I hope to raise in the film is: If people are making the choice to sell a kidney out of economic desperation, does it invalidate this as an act of free will? And do they have the right to make this decision about their own bodies? Also, if the act of selling can liberate them from poverty, do we have a right to condemn them to the poverty they are trying to escape? Having said that, there is no doubt that the black market organ trade is rife with exploitation. Virtually all organ sellers are shortchanged by brokers – who are often grassroots recruiters – and who barter in kidneys to make

a quick buck. Furthermore, there is no guarantee the organ donors are properly tested and should things go wrong (and they often do) these sellers have no safety net.

Another misconception is that the organ trade is driven by rich Westerners who have no qualms about travelling to developing countries to harvest the organs of the poor. But generally, this is far from reality. The trade is driven by affluent (often middle class) Westerners who are desperate to live. But it is also driven by locals who can afford the transplant. Filipinos buy organs from Filipinos. Chinese buy organs from Chinese, and Indians buy organs from Indians. This is not only a trade driven by the West. Those that come from “the West” are often those who have been taken off the transplant list at home because their health has deteriorated during their years of waiting on dialysis. So they are no longer eligible for a transplant. They either find a kidney overseas, or they die. And most of them want to believe that they are somehow helping the people who are selling their kidneys. This is sometimes self-­‐ serving rationalization, but I guess it’s human nature. And sometimes, as you will see in my film, it’s true.

Clearly the buyer and seller stereotypes don’t hold. What about the idea that is only poor men selling their organs to support their families?

Both women and men sell their kidneys. In India there are villages of women who all bear the scar of having sold their kidneys.

So is the fact that the functioning of the organ market depends on a lot more than poor men being forced to sell their kidneys the most important take-­‐home from the film?

If there’s one message that I hope the film succeeds in delivering, it’s that this is a complex issue, often misrepresented by the media as pure and simple exploitation. What I discovered while making this film is that it’s a much more nuanced issue, and one that won’t simply be resolved by trying to shut down the black market. We can only succeed in doing so, if we find solutions for those in need of a transplant, and opportunities for those who desperately need the money. This film is as much about poverty as it is about the organ trade.

The ethical ambiguities of the organ trade come through strongly in the film. Where do you come down personally on the morality or immorality of selling or buying an organ on the black market? Did your position change on account making this film?

There are no legal ambiguities in the organ trade. It’s illegal to buy or sell a kidney. Period. But my experience making the film was a real emotional and ethical roller coaster. I think that the black market has to be shut down – as a “black market.” The black market potentially leaves both the organ sellers AND the recipients vulnerable to abuse and to sub-­‐standard medical practice. What threw me off while filming was the sudden realization that, for some people, selling a kidney might, in fact, help them out of a life of relentless subsistence existence. At one point during the shoot we were following a young man trying to sell his kidney. His dream was to move out of the urban slum where he and his wife and young child live in a borrowed hut, into a small house in a rural area where he could farm and raise chickens. The kidney broker he was working with got scared by our cameras and, at the last minute, told him the operation was cancelled. In fact, she had switched to another donor with the same blood type. Instead of feeling like I had saved him, I felt like I had robbed him of what might be his only chance to better himself. I was surprised at my own feelings and that’s when I decided that I wanted to take viewers on the same ethically ambiguous journey I took while making the film. There is no simple solution, but closing our eyes to it and just trying to shut down the black market will only drive it further underground.

I need to be clear that this is a very different issue than the stories emerging from China where they are executing prisoners for their organs. Or in villages in India where moneylenders are forcing their debtors to sell their kidneys to repay them. These are not ethically ambiguous circumstances. But most of the organ trade takes place in the more ambiguous world of desperation on both sides of the equation.

Are there important differences between the black market organ trade and other illicit economies, such as human trafficking or the global drug trade?

I don’t think human trafficking or the drug trade have very much in common with the organ trade even though they’re often lumped together. There is no analogy there. The interesting thing about the organ trade is that the act of giving an organ is considered heroic in our society. And the medical risks of doing so are considered acceptable by the medical and ethical establishment, or they wouldn’t encourage and accept altruistic donation. The point here is that something changes when you add money to this equation. At the end of the day, donating an organ is a “good”

act. It saves a life. So the question is, how and why does money change the equation? I think a closer analogy to kidney selling is surrogate motherhood. Pregnancy and kidney donation both have about the same medical risk. And in both cases, the outcome for the recipients (of the baby or the kidney) is positive. The question always remains – is it merely exploitative or is there a model that is ethically acceptable? I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s a question that has to be explored and not shut down in a knee-­‐jerk fashion. Our medical ethics continue to evolve with advances in medicine. Stem cell research has forced us to reconsider many aspects of our existence. I’m not an expert in these issues, but I would hope that those who are will continue to discuss and debate openly.

How would you characterize the role of the Internet in the black market organ trade? Has it made it easier or harder to track and regulate?

The Internet has certainly played a role in the black market, but, based on my experience filming, it has changed over time. There was a time when there were numerous websites offering various operations and what is called “transplant tourism” all over the world. Most of these sites are shutting down as the efforts to curb the trade in human organs become more organized and as more cases of black market operations are being prosecuted. Most of the people I’ve spoken with who went overseas (people who appear in the film and many others who are either on the cutting room floor or who didn’t want to participate in the documentary) found their “brokers” through friends or friends of friends or through contacts in dialysis centers. Having said that, the Internet, including YouTube and Facebook are full of appeals from people in dire need of an organ looking for someone to help them. It’s heartbreaking listening to or reading the stories of family members trying find donors for their loved ones as you can feel the absolute desperation in their pleas. This is not about the black market, but rather appealing to altruistic donors. And there are many examples of people who have found their donors in this way. So the Internet continues to be a platform in which people try to find solutions.

And what about using the internet to help in tracking and regulation?

I think tracking the black market is very difficult. Doctors in the West are best able to collect data as they see patients that come back from overseas with a new kidney. And if they didn’t get transplanted at home, then clearly, in most cases, they went the illicit route. Regulating it is another story entirely. In countries that claim to have shut down the trade, there are still cases. In the Philippines, for example, affluent Filipinos can still buy their kidneys by having the “donor” claim that they’re giving their organ altruistically. Even in the West, there is no way we can track who is getting paid if they tell the ethics committee that they are donating out of the goodness of their heart. None of these illegal transactions are currently being tracked by anyone because they are untrackable. I think the World Health

Organization’s estimate that one kidney is sold every sixty minutes is a gross understatement. In “Tales From the Organ Trade” we film someone who sold his kidney on Craigslist. But that’s not what he told the hospital. So there are lots of illicit operations taking place around the globe that are slipping through the cracks.

What does the evolution of the black market organ trade reveal about the impacts of globalization on developing versus developed countries? If and how are the flows of donors and recipients likely to change in future?

The evolution and expansion of the organ trade is a matter of supply and demand. And the demand side of the equation is growing rapidly. There was a time when there were fewer candidates for transplantation because tissue matching had to be much more exact. Now, with the anti-­‐rejection drugs and the cocktails of medication people can take, it’s easier to match people. Also, we’ve expanded the criteria for who is eligible for a kidney. As we increase the ages of those we’re willing to perform transplants for, we increase the need for kidneys. Also, diabetes, the leading cause of kidney disease, is the fastest growing disease in many countries right now. Finally, even as we push for more people to sign their donor cards (which is absolutely necessary since, besides kidneys, we still need lungs and hearts and other organs that can’t be donated until death) you have to die in a certain way for your organs to be useful. With seatbelt laws, for example, there is less mortality on the highways. We simply don’t have enough people to donate even if we all signed our cards. So the demand will continue to increase at breakneck speed. As for supply, unless we can eradicate poverty, there will always be people willing to sell their kidneys.

I guess our ability to travel across the globe to procure a kidney in a developing country can be called an impact of globalization. But so much of this trade also takes place by locals, with locals, that it’s more an indication of the staggering chasm between the haves and the have-­‐nots. As I saw with the gentleman who sold his kidney in the U.S. on Craigslist, this isn’t something that only happens on foreign soil.

So, with globalization fueling the creation of extreme income inequality around the world, is there any reason to hope that the trade’s exponential growth trajectory might change?

I think one of the great hopes for the future is that medical science will be able to bio-­‐engineer a kidney and potentially other organs. That would be the ideal solution.

Do individual states have any ability to influence the future of the black market organ trade? In the course of making the film, did you come across a state who’s approach to this issue struck you as particularly smart or forward-­‐looking?

I think individual states are trying to influence the future of the black market. In 2008, more than 100 national and international medical organizations and other bodies, including some government agencies, endorsed the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism. The declaration is a document that advocates the prohibition of transplant commercialism, transplant tourism and organ trafficking. Executive members of this initiative have been travelling the world advocating for every country to develop it’s own cadaveric organ donation system and to shut down the black market. I think all this effort is laudable, but it’s not working. The black market is just being driven further underground. In many countries where they proudly report that no foreigners can get transplants, there are still operations going on in the dark of night in hospitals in the provinces where all it takes is a little bit of cash to get the medical staff to participate and the security staff to turn a blind eye.

Even more troubling are the countries that claim to have shut down the black market but are actually skirting the law in another, more dangerous way. Their hospitals accept recipients as long as they bring their own donor. So recipients find their donors in developing countries and travel to a medical center in Egypt, for example, to get their transplant. Then everyone returns to their home country. The transplant is not tracked as illicit. And the donor has absolutely no access to the hospital or any medical care post op. The black market is flourishing in many countries including Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt, and Columbia, and it is starting to pick up in Iraq at the moment.

And what about countries setting standards for best practices?

Spain is a great example of a country that has been very proactive in solving the organ shortage. They have what is called an “opt-­‐out” system or “presumed consent.” This means that everyone in the country is presumed to be an organ donor (on death) unless they actively opt-­‐out and request NOT to be a donor. This has increased the amount of donors considerably and they have a much shorter waiting list. Of course, an initiative like this has to be coupled with a very well coordinated system that works within each hospital to identify patients that are potential donors

(meaning clinically brain dead, for example) so that they can be matched before they expire. Grisly, but true. There are other countries with the opt-­‐out system, but it hasn’t been implemented in North America.

One thing is very clear to me. We will not be able to eradicate the black market if we don’t find a solution to the organ shortage. When it comes to life and death, if someone has the wherewithal, they will choose life. And how can we judge them? What would each one of us do faced with a similar life or death situation?

Did you notice any differences in the tenor of the debates over the black market organ trade in North America versus Europe?

It’s not really a debate in either region because everyone is in agreement that the black market is objectionable. While there are several serious thinkers, ethicists, and doctors trying to propose an ethical framework for incentivized donation, there is no traction for this anywhere in the world but Iran. So there isn’t a robust debate for the moment. Iran does allow compensation for donors. And there is no one on the waiting list. Everyone who needs a kidney gets a kidney. I tried to get into Iran but they wouldn’t grant me a visa. But I’ve heard two distinctively different takes on Iran – both from reliable sources: the first is that the system is not working for the donors because they are stigmatized and no better off financially soon after they donate their kidney because the money runs out and they are back at square one. The other source tells me that young men in Iran are selling their kidneys for a down payment on a house, and that this is common practice and it’s allowing them to start a life with a roof over their heads.

It seems like there are no shortage of cases which complicate the assumption that donation with compensation is a uniformly bad idea.

I spoke with an Indian transplant surgeon who challenged me with a case that he had recently confronted. A father came to him wanting to sell his kidney to raise money for a daughter who was ill. He needed the funds for her treatment. The daughter is the sole breadwinner in the family and if she can’t work, the entire family will end up on the street. He had to refuse this man’s kidney because it is illegal for him to accept it. The daughter didn’t survive and these parents are now living on the street in abject poverty. Ironically, if his daughter had kidney failure, he would have been allowed to give her his kidney. But he wasn’t allowed to sell it to save her life.

This example really forced me to think about the organ trade in very different terms.

Tales From the Organ Trade Norm Wilner

http://www.nowtoronto.com/hotdocs/2013/film-­‐detail.cfm?film=570&ref=reviews&sort=newest

NOW RATING: NNNN

It's illegal for people who need a kidney to pay someone to make the potentially life-­‐saving donation. But it happens all the time, as Ric Esther Bienstock shows us in her global look at the kidney trade. Tracking the efforts of Canadian and American kidney patients to find healthy organs on the black market while also telling the stories of the Third World people who provide said organs at cut-­‐rate prices, Tales From The Organ Trade explores the awful lengths to which people on either end of the exchange will go to stay alive -­‐ or make a living.

Tapping David Cronenberg to narrate the doc in his soothing, slightly sinister way is a stroke of genius, though Bienstock's decision in the final moments to advocate for paid kidney donation feels a little strange, given that she's just shown us how easily paid donors can be abused.

Hot Docs 2013 Interview: TALES FROM THE ORGAN TRADE Director Ric Esther Bienstock Jason Gorber

http://twitchfilm.com/2013/04/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐interview-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐director-­‐ric-­‐esther-­‐bienstock.html

Ric Esther Bienstock's documentary about human organ trafficking is both beautifully made and refreshingly sophisticated. I spoke with the Emmy Award winning director as her film is set to make its local debut at Toronto's Hot Docs festival.

What I adored about your film was the whole notion that it opened up questions for debate without ever coming across as polemical. How important that was to you when you tackled a subject matter like this?

Well, it was imperative. I mean, you nailed it -­‐ I started out thinking it was going to be a very black and white issue and issue, the story of exploitation, a story that we kind of read in the media and that we've seen before in other films. As I kind of got deeper and deeper into the world, I started questioning my own ethics, I guess.

I really wanted filmically to do the same thing -­‐ Where you watch it, and it's what you think it's gonna be, and then you slowly get taken into the kind of nuanced, complex world that really typifies the organ trade.

A major pet peeve for me is when with some films, particularly theatrical documentary at festivals have 90 minutes agreeing with something the audiences already is in lockstep with and it's just an exercise in preaching to the converted. So, when I see films like yours that genuinely challenge preconceptions, I feel the need to jump up and down and champion it! My point is, I guess, thank you for your moral ambivalence!

Well, thank you for getting it. Really, I mean it! It was not... it was not an easy way to go, in the sense that I don't want to be seen as advocating for "hey, let's pay people for their organs!"

On one hand I started wondering myself for people like Eddie Boy in the film, is selling a kidney the worst thing in the world for him? I mean, maybe it's not? The black market is bad because it's unregulated, but... Well, I'm glad you said that because that's what made it interesting to me, to be honest.

And part of that interest, I assume, is you also become a character in your film when you actually track down the notorious doctor. Were you always going to be an on-­‐screen presence in this story?

There were four different stories I track in the film: The American guy who needs a kidney, the Canadian woman who's on dialysis and her family, the Philippine story and the Kosovo story. Part of that [division] was a filmic imperative, as there was not one strong narrative that would tell the whole story.

With the Kosovo story, I realized the prosecution isn't what's interesting, but I wanted to track down all of the people from one certain operation and how they all converged in this clinic in the middle of a brand new country. It just seemed like that would tell me something.

What I find really interesting about the organ trade is that it's illegal, and that people always they talk about the drug trade and the arms trade and the human trafficking and organ trafficking [in the same way]. But organ trafficking is very different because the people who are going to buy organs are regular, law abiding citizens. They're not criminals, they're people who probably never broke a law in their life.

The people who are selling their kidneys are desperate. Even the people who are doing these operations, they're trained surgeons and doctors, so it's a bizarre amalgamation of normally law abiding citizens who do this.

I thought, well, if I spoke to each one of them and found out how each of them made their way to this clinic it would be very interesting. I asked Raoul, how did you find your way to Kosovo? When I tracked down the donor I asked, how did you get there and just the mechanics of it? I thought [these] were interesting and the motivating factors.

So I really wasn't planning to be in it until I realized this tracking down of these people. I mean, I didn't make a meal of it! The only one I really talk about in terms of my involvement was the notorious Turkish surgeon, because he's so notorious and he's called Dr. Frankenstein.

Often with these movies you will have some nefarious character, some bogeyman there that the filmmakers just couldn't get or couldn't get on record. The strongest thing for me again is not just the moral shades that you do but also the characters, the fact that you were able to draw on such a diversity of people. If you could go even more into detail about going to a website and putting into a comment page to talk to an International fugitive, emailing "Hey, can we talk to you?", and it actually working?

It was so ridiculous!

Before we found him, I shouldn't admit this, before we found his webpage, we had been trying to find him through someone he went to school with, all of these different ways, because his website didn't come up at first in our searches. So finally, when I found his webpage, it was almost like.. it was ridiculous. This notorious surgeon, arrested 6 times!

I sent him my e-­‐mail, and he e-­‐mailed me back very quickly, within the hour. He basically said you spelled my name wrong, which I did in the e-­‐mail I sent to him. And that was it. So I was thinking, Oh my God, I get a hold of this guy whose name I've misspelled?

So I sent an e-­‐mail right away saying don't mistake the fact that I misspelled this for a lack of professionality. Would you be willing to just meet me for a coffee? And I spelled coffee wrong, on purpose.

It's very hard in e-­‐mails to be a person as opposed to just a journalist. In my initial request to him I crafted a letter saying if I just wanted to vilify you, then I could just use the stock footage. Initially he said he wasn't interested, and then he wrote back and he said that he Googled me to find out what I'm about. I guess he saw that I had made other films and he said meeting for a cup of coffee doesn't sound so bad.

So i flew to Turkey to have a cup of coffee with a crew on hold in case. When I landed in Turkey I had a contact there because I needed a crew and I don't speak Turkish. She said who are you meeting, and when I told her he's quite well known in Turkey because he's also a fantastic surgeon and he's notorious there. She said he's wanted

by Interpol, if I wanted to meet him I couldn't go alone. I said, don't be ridiculous, he's a surgeon! Nothing's going to happen, I'm not blowing this.

I get into my hotel room, and the moment I get there the phone rings. It's him, and I'm wondering how he knows I walked in just this second, unless he has someone downstairs, so it started feeling very... cloak and dagger.

We were supposed to meet the next day at this restaurant on the Asian side of Istanbul. I had my contact put me in a taxi and give him the address because he didn't speak English, and I walk in, and the doctor is sitting there at this restaurant with his mother and his father and his wife and his young child. All of a sudden there's kind of all the niceties of "hello, pleasure to meet you"... It was really cognitive dissonance and very surreal.

I spent the whole dinner trying to be really polite to everybody and also convince him to be in the film. After the whole dinner he said that he didn't see any benefit to being being in my film. I said well, let's talk about it some more, can we meet tomorrow, and he said he'd think about it.

The next day I was just waiting for his call -­‐ it was very tense for me because I'd just schlepped all the way to Turkey! He called and said meet me at 1:00 at this restaurant. His wife was there, and he said, "I'll do the interview." I said, that's great, but what changed your mind? He said, "my mother liked you."

I wish it was a better story, because my conversation was so incisive, I convinced him on ideological reasons, but basically his mother trusted me. I was honest, I said I would not misportray him, that what he said would will go in.

The truth is the interview, is a bit disingenuous. He has Interpol hanging over his head. He didn't really admit to anything, he didn't talk about it like the Israeli doctor did.

Exactly.

[He didn't] talk about why he ideologically does this.

And it completely comes across in the film -­‐ his reticence is absolutely made explicit.

I make no judgments. I'm hoping that it comes across that it's not like I believe everything he says. That's why I ended up interviewing his mother and his wife because, I thought that every alleged organ trafficker still has a mother who thinks, "Why is everyone picking on my son?"

Such a nice Jewish girl going to Turkey to talk to Frankenstein's mother.... When we talk about cognitive dissonance, you have the master of cognitive dissonance as your narrator. How did working with David Cronenberg came about?

Sometimes I narrate my own films. Somebody else suggested [Cronenberg] to me and I thought it was brilliant. He is associated with a kind of intelligent discomfort with body parts and our relationship to our body. I loved his voice, by the way. What i wanted was more of a deadpan, not emotional read, I just wanted someone to take you through the story and not be this omnipresent voice in the film.

It's a bit of a wink, but he's associated with that, and we're all very uncomfortable about the idea of selling body parts. The film ethically made me feel uncomfortable because you're talking about something that is really anathema to what we think our moral and ethical standard is, so it just felt like it made intelligent sense, it had a context.

It's tremendous because it feels like he's just trying to tell you the story, not like he's narrating.

I know one of your previous films showed on PBS's Frontline. I think it's completely underappreciated by particularly people who are slightly snobbish towards television documentaries, not recognizing that occasionally within the idiom of PBS you're getting some of the strongest documentaries ever made.

Well, I had to recut my film Sex Slaves for Frontline. They generally just do domestic stories and there were no Americans involved so they wanted me in it. I'm not in the international version or Canadian version of the film, but they wanted me in it telling how I got the story and that made it more relatable to their audience. But I think Frontline does fantastic work.

Do you see a fundamental difference between an ostensibly cinematic documentary and one made for a television audience?

It's funny that you say that's cinematic -­‐ was just at a film festival in New Zealand, and while I was being interviewed they talked about the filmmaking part. I said that what I always try to do is investigative cinema.

On the one hand, it's a real journalistic endeavour. Besides dealing with the issue, I want to make a movie that has all the peaks and valleys of any non-­‐fiction film, one that looks good, that draws you in. I don't want to make films that just preach about a specific issue.

I tried to do that with Sex Slaves too -­‐ Obviously, it's a really good issue, but it's all through characters. Character's always the most important in the kind of stuff that I've been doing.

Was there something about this narrative, as broad as it is, was there a direction you had wanted to go to that you were just unable to?

Don't get me started! Whenever you make a film, you're always trying to get more and more access and more story.

It's hard right now for me to remember because I think not one story really played out the way I expected. For example, Walter gets an altruistic donor, and that changed the entire film. The donor, the Moldovan woman who I found, she was the last piece of the puzzle and the toughest to actually find, that was real sleuthing to find her.

I didn't put it in the film because it just wasn't necessary at that point in the film, but it was real sleuthing to track her down. I had to find out who she was first, and I couldn't get the evidence from Jonathan Rattel, the UN prosecutor. There's a defence attorney in Kosovo, and he has all the evidence, so I convinced him to let me look through his files and found her passport. I then went to Moldova to track her down, so there's a whole story there.

If she had been hard done by or ripped off, the film would have had a very different tone as well.

So I guess that at the end of the film, you never know what's going to happen. I imagined the film might end with someone languishing on dialysis thinking about this.

In films like this that are investigative, there are so many different roads I start talking initially because really, until I'm in it, I'm following the puck in so many ways. I'm following the puck and you just end up following it in different directions. You come back with all of your footage and you make the film out of all of that.

It would have been great to have had one narrative story that carried the whole film but there was no way I could do that. Initially, i thought I might have been able to, but there was no way I could do that and cover all of the emotional beats that needed to be covered in the film.

You have a strong connection with (award winning documentarian Simcha Jacobovichi). How do you help each other out?

I always laugh and say that Simcha does biblical archaeology and I do sex and death. Simcha and I have worked on and off together for a very long time, so I produce or executive produce a lot of his stuff. He's based in Israel now, so I run the production company from here, and he produces or executive produces my stuff. That's just a long standing relationship.

How did you get the film made?

HBO Documentary films in the States and Shaw media in Canada and Canal D in Quebec and Rogers Documentary fund funded it. They were really supportive, because the film took way longer to make because it really was investigative and things had to play out. And I have to give credit because that was a luxury that you often might not have with a television funded documentary.

I have to say that the support, the reason I'm so overwhelmed by the support -­‐ I mean everyone's happy when you get funding -­‐ But I was overwhelmed by the fact that the film took a very different take as I went on location and they supported that. They gave me the time and the space to do this.

I was getting panicked as it got later, and both Shaw Media and HBO said take your time, make it good. It does take time to do things like this, particularly when they're investigative, because real life just does not happen on a schedule.

I'm not just asking a banal question because you're a professional so of course you're telling your story and you're going to be able to maintain objectivity, but when you're in the conditions that you're in, there must be some sense of humanity there that is challenged. Can you expand on seeing such drear circumstances but still being the Western reporter there telling the story?

It's a really good point because a lot of my stories have [dealt with] that. Sex Slave, Ebola, most of the stuff I've done, not all, has been pretty dark.

I've filmed all over Africa, is that the urban slums in Manila was the worst I've ever seen. Everyone's crammed into a small place, there's no running water, there's no toilets of course, there's jerry rigged electricity. One of the challenges is going to go back to my hotel at the end of the night after interviewing somebody and mining their misery. Eddie Boy or Joe Boy, I mean, how much worse can it get that you can't stand up in your own house because it's so low?

Often when I'm shooting stuff I'm very sympathetic to the characters, I'm just getting the footage. It's physically uncomfortable and it's emotionally charged and challenging, but you just do it because you're so inside the story.

My emotional reactions often happen in the edit suite when I finally let go and start watching the footage. You're in a zone when you're doing that. I'm not a news reporter, I really hang out with my characters to get them to feel comfortable with me to start feeling like the cameras are invisible. That's the only way to get that kind of access is to hang out and have them realize that you're not just going in for a quick soundbite.

There have been a lot of stories about the organ trade but all of these guys in the village, they've been spoken to by the media before and they've all said it's horrible, it's terrible. I hung out with them a few days and went to cock fights with them and shared meals with them, then they started loosening up and started talking openly.

That's when you start getting footage of them saying yeah, I bought a washing machine with the kidney money and I blew the rest on drinks. Finally they were comfortable enough, despite the language barrier, to really be a bit more natural. I think that's where you get the real story, but from an emotional point of view, seeing poverty. That's something that you do, and I don't know how that affects you. Some people say maybe that's why I'm so neurotic and miserable and find the negative in everything, even when I'm here.

You may claim to be be neurotic and miserable, but your film exudes life! Who knows how we'd behave in similar circumstances. The film certainly raises questions about the black market versus calls for regulated transactions...

Well, we all have to sign our donor cards, there's no doubt about that.

It is very easy to judge when you're not in that situation, but if you know that you're not going to survive on dialysis and make it to the top of the list, that's a death sentence, you just need a donor, you can't find one. When people are faced with life and death, they're going to choose life if they have the wherewithal to do it, you can't blame them.

On the other side of the equation is you have to give people who have no other choice. Yet poverty itself is not a reason to do anything. We never say it's OK to sell your child because you're poverty stricken, you would never want to go there. What makes this so morally and ethically complex is that we're OK if you give a kidney, we're just not ok if there's money in the transaction.

I'm very interested in why, money changes it. I believe that it actually does, but why does money change it. Money is not morally neutral anymore. If you wanted to give me your kidney Jason, they'd have no problem with it. That's what's so striking about this particular issue.

Keep your hands off my kidneys! You said money changes the issue, makes things more complicated. This is one of the motivating factors of why people in documentaries tend not to paid interviews. When you're shooting in such stark poverty, the pressure must have been enormous to somehow contribute to better their life in order for them to tell their story. How do you deal with that?

That's been raised a lot, not only in the context of this film but in general in the documentary community.

I don't believe in paying for interviews because I do believe that you influence people. I don't want people who talk to me to feel beholden. I actually think it's detrimental to getting a story, getting a real story. I really believe that.

Having said that, there is no way that I am going to mine someone's misery for days on end and then leave to go back to Canada without giving them a thank you, an honorarium. And if I'm done, if I'm done filming, then I think I just couldn't live with myself if,

I know it's a hot button issue. With Sex Slaves I remember that I was getting an Emmy in New York, and I'm wearing a dress that costs more than those women make in a year, and I'm having a 5 course dinner and all the glitterati were there. I thought, how would I feel if I had not given them an honorarium. I'm only there because of them.

People have to use their own judgment. Chequebook journalism, that's bad, for all of the reasons that you already know. But did I help Eddie Boy afterwards? Yes.

It's very sensitive. Someone said to me, why would you admit that you do that? First of all, I think even the people who don't admit they're doing it [are doing the same]. There's different ways to characterize it -­‐ I paid them for their time, I paid them for their electricity. There's all these, but I just think you have to be careful and not go "I'll give you money for your interview." You do see it sometimes, people saying exactly what you'd expect them to say.

The biggest luxury that we have as documentary filmmakers is the time to get to know people and to make them comfortable, comfortable enough to be natural on camera.

Thank you. I really adored this film, and have been more than a bit evangelical about it to fellow critics.

I'm so thrilled that you get it, that you get the tension and that it speaks to you. It really means a lot. You're taking away exactly what I wanted you to from the film.

Jesse Kline on selling organs: Don’t let high-­‐minded ideals get in the way of saving lives Jesse Kline http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/05/01/jesse-­‐kline-­‐on-­‐selling-­‐organs/

TORONTO — Is it immoral to buy and sell human organs? That’s the question explored by Canadian documentary filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock in Tales from the Organ Trade, which had its North American premier at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival on Sunday.

Bienstock was quite candid about the journey she and her staff took while making the film. Going into the project, the issue appeared to be black and white. After spending time with people in the Philippines who were counting on the money they could make from selling a kidney to lift their families out of poverty, the director realized the issue wasn’t so cut and dry.

The film profiled families in Canada and the United States who were in desperate need of a kidney transplant, as well as people living overseas who were looking to sell their organs. The movie focused on kidneys because they are in high demand, and the fact that people are born with two of them, but only need one to survive, makes them a valuable commodity.

But not everyone thinks that body parts should be treated as commodities, which is why most countries have made the practice of selling organs illegal. This has not stopped a thriving black market from developing around the world — especially in poor countries where people need the money.

This raises the question of whether rich people in Western countries are taking advantage of poor people in the developing world. By speaking to people who are willingly giving up their kidneys in exchange for cash, the movie shows that the vast majority of organ trafficking appears to be done on a voluntary basis. It also shows that there is a huge demand for organs here at home, and that people are willing to go to great lengths, and incredible expense, to save their life, or that of their loved ones.

There is a huge demand for kidney transplants in Canada, which is not being met by the current system of altruistic donations. According to The Kidney Foundation of Canada, over 23,000 Canadians were on dialysis in 2010 — a costly procedure that drains the patient both mentally and physically.

At the same time, close to 3,500 Canadians were waiting for a transplant, and the list keeps getting bigger.

Approximately 16 Canadians are told they have kidney failure on a daily basis. In Ontario and British Columbia — the provinces with the longest waiting lists — it can take four to six years to make it to the top. In 2010, 82 Canadians died while waiting for a transplant. (In the U.S., that number is much higher — about 18 per day.)

For many patients, going overseas to receive a transplant is the only available option, as the alternative is certain death. This can pose a tough moral dilemma, but so long as everyone involved in the transaction is doing so willingly, it is a win-­‐win situation: The seller gets the money he needs to survive, and the buyer gets an operation that not only improves his quality of life, but extends it immensely.

There are, however, risks to operating the system underground. One man who appeared in Tales from the Organ Trade sold his kidney, only to find out after the fact that he had kidney problems himself and would eventually need a transplant of his own. This is something that likely never would have happened if the transaction was allowed to take place above board.

The solution would be to legalize and regulate the practice of buying and selling organs. After all, how can donating for altruistic reasons be good, but doing the same thing for compensation be bad? Allowing legal organ sales would not only increase the supply of donors, thereby saving the lives of countless Canadians, it also has the potential to save the government a considerable amount of money.

The cost of putting a patient on dialysis — which must be continued until a transplant becomes available — is approximately $60,000 per year. Compare that to a transplant, which costs $23,000, plus $6,000 per year in medication. Over a five-­‐year period, the transplant will save the public-­‐health system approximately $250,000.

Despite the fact that voluntary transactions are, by their very nature, beneficial to all the parties involved, many still argue that allowing people to receive compensation for organ donations would amount to exploiting the poor — a very easy position for Westerners, who do not face the very real threat of starvation on a daily basis, to take.

Dr. Robert Klitzman, who spoke about this issue on CBC Radio’s The Current on Monday, worries that such a scheme would “primarily draw organs from poor people” and “crowd out altruism.” Yet, a 2010 survey conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that monetary compensation increased the likelihood that someone would donate an organ, but that the effect was the same regardless of socioeconomic status. It also found that the monetary incentive did not affect the number of people willing to donate for free.

There is no way to stop the organ trade. So long as there are people who need organs to save their lives, and others who are willing to sell them, a market will exist. The best we can do is bring the trade out in the open, to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

This can be a tricky subject, but the fact remains that people are dying because they don’t have access to life-­‐ saving treatments. How many more people are we willing let die because some people think money is dirty?

Prosecutor awaits verdict in Kosovo organ trafficking trial Julian Sher

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/19/prosecutor_awaits_verdict_in_kosovo_o rgan_trafficking_trial.html

He has spent the past three years piecing together an underground global web of what he calls “the cruel harvest of the poor” — an alleged human organ trafficking ring centred in a Kosovo clinic but stretching from Russia to Turkey and Canada.

Now prosecutor Jonathan Ratel awaits a verdict as early as next week in a trial that featured sometimes chilling testimony from more than 80 witnesses — including a crucial eyewitness account from a Toronto man who paid for a kidney in what the court heard was a vast and illegal trade in human body parts.

“The single motivating factor behind this enterprise was the opportunity for obscene profits available in the black market organ trade,” said Ratel, a lawyer from British Columbia who now serves as head of the European Union’s Special Prosecution Office in Kosovo, in a telephone interview from Pristina.

His case was so complex and the alleged conspiracy straddled so many countries that his closing arguments last week included 250 PowerPoint slides and lasted six-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half hours.

Ratel began his investigation in March 2010 and the trial before three international judges got underway in September 2011.

Seven Kosovo Albanians and two foreign nationals linked to a now shuttered clinic in Pristina face charges of human trafficking, organized crime and illegal medical activities.

Dr. Yusuf Sonmez, the Turkish surgeon called “Dr. Vulture” and “Dr. Frankenstein” in the European press and identified by the prosecution as being at the centre of the alleged trafficking operation, remains at large, along with an Israeli accused of being the financial middleman.

According to the indictment, two dozen illegal kidney transplants took place at the Medicus Clinic in 2008.

Investigators were able to trace more than $825,000 (U.S.) in cash payments to the doctors and the clinic for just nine of those operations, the court documents say.

Last January, the Toronto Star first revealed that one of the people who received a kidney was an ailing investment consultant from North York named Raul Fain.

Last March, Fain testified via video link from Canada that he paid $105,000 for a transplant operation at the clinic in the summer of 2008. He said he faced the prospect of waiting up to 12 years for such an operation in Canada.

Fain testified that he flew to Kosovo from Turkey, along with a German man also seeking a kidney and two Russian women who were to be donors.

He told the court he later saw the two Russian women at the clinic but did not talk with them.

Fain was not charged in the case, nor were any of the other organ recipients, who came from Germany, Israel, Poland, Ukraine and Turkey.

Buying organs is illegal in Canada, but no Canadian law prevents citizens from purchasing body parts abroad.

The Kidney Foundation of Canada and many other major medical associations support the 2008 Declaration of Istanbul, a non-­‐binding international statement of principles that denounces transplant tourism.

“Fain’s testimony was important,” prosecutor Ratel told the Star. “He was candid and honest and his credibility was very high.”

Ratel said Fain’s testimony helped “crystallize” the role of Russian and other foreign donors who, from impoverished regions of Europe, “recruited with false promises of payments.”

A Ukrainian man testified how he was lured to the clinic after reading an Internet ad promising $30,000 (U.S.) for an organ, but he said he was later abandoned at an airport, without the money and without a kidney.

Fain testified that he spent five days recovering at the clinic before flying back to Toronto, noting his recovery was “uneventful and faster than expected.”

Then last May, just two months after that testimony — and almost four years after purchasing a kidney in Kosovo that came from a woman in Russia — Fain died.

The condolence book in his name on the Steeles Memorial Chapel website does not give a cause of death but says it was a “sudden passing.”

Fain and his family had declined to speak to the Star.

Before he died, Fain granted interviews to Toronto filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock for her documentary, Tales from the Organ Trade, which has its North American premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival.

“To sell an organ, it’s a terrible thing,” Fain said on camera. “But on the other hand, if it saves your life . . . that’s why it can never be, you know, 100 per cent one way and it’s bad and that’s it.”

“I can say from my experience that the donors seemed quite willing to do the surgery,” he said.

Ratel said a donor’s apparent willingness was not the issue.

“The point is that this is illegal because you cannot consent to sell your organs,” the prosecutor said. “It is illegal in every country of the world save the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“Would you sell your organs?” he asked. “The answer is no — emphatically, at any price. And the only people who would are the chronically desperate, the indigent and the poor.”

The World Health Organization estimates that organ trafficking accounts for as much as 10 per cent of the approximately 70,000 kidney transplants performed annually throughout the world.

Sonmez, the Turkish surgeon who performed the operation on Fain and is named by prosecutors as an “indicted co-­‐ conspirator” in the trial, is sought by Interpol under a “Red Notice” for “organ trafficking and related criminal offences.”

Sonmez still maintains a website, where he says he has performed close to 2,400 kidney transplants — all of them legal, he insists.

Since being on the run, he has refused to speak to the media, including repeated requests from the Star. In a lengthy interview for Bienstock’s documentary, he was adamant he “did not commit any crime.”

“All over the world, in all kinds of TV channels and newspapers, so many talks about this organized crime, international trafficking and organs — so what?” he said. “This is pushed by the media, by the press.”

He said those who donated their organs for his operations filled out consent forms stating they did so willingly and not for money.

“They were signing that there is no money matter, that there is no selling, no buying, only for altruistic reasons,” Sonmez said.

Ratel said, “This has been exposed through the evidence of the trial as a false claim.”

He said there was money offered and in some cases money received by some of what he calls the “donor victims.”

“This was payment for organs,” the prosecutor said.

He said investigators last year had tracked down Sonmez to Pretoria, South Africa, and there have been reports in the Serbian press he has set up another clinic in another unidentified country in Africa.

“We are concerned with his ongoing activities,” is all Ratel will say.

If convicted, Sonmez’s colleagues at the Medicus Clinic could face up to 20 years on the most serious “organized crime” charges and 15 years for trafficking in humans.

Two assistant anesthetists among the accused testified in court that they took part in organ transplants but did not know the operations were illegal, according to news accounts of the trial.

Lutfi Dervishi, the owner of a Kosovo clinic and one of the accused ringleaders, told a Balkan news agency that “what is written in the indictment is nonsense.”

“The prosecution is libelling us,” he said.

Ratel said that regardless of the outcome of his long-­‐running trial, he hopes it will inspire Canada and other Western countries to enact new legislation that would make it as illegal to travel overseas to buy an organ as it currently is to purchase one at home.

“The message is clear,” he said. “Do we wish to engage in an insidious trade in the human condition?”

Tales from the Organ Trade Angelo Muredda

http://torontoist.com/2013/04/tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade/

How do you regulate black-­‐market organ trafficking around the world when the demand in developed countries far exceeds the supply from legal donors? That’s the animating question behind Emmy-­‐award-­‐ winner Ric Esther Bienstock’s Tales from the Organ Trade, an intelligent and engaging look at the transnational politics, economics, and ethical quagmires of organ donation.

Narrated by a bemused David Cronenberg—a perfect choice, given his own filmography’s fixation on the horror of squishy organs in alien bodies—the film is foremost a wide-­‐ranging outsider’s look into a complex system. Rather than simply lambasting the self-­‐interested and exploitative work of a top clandestine surgeon nicknamed “Doctor Frankenstein,” Bienstock is more interested in tracing the good and (more commonly) bad effects of a largely uncontrolled industry that thrives on the unmet needs of middle-­‐class recipients on their last legs, as well as the dire situations faced by impoverished donors in the Philippines, for whom a donation is something far more complicated than a gift.

Overlong and too reliant at times on statistical charts to set the scene, this is nevertheless an admirably restrained and informative look at how such an intimate medical procedure is inflected by a wide array of geopolitical forces.

Hot Docs 2013: Tales From the Organ Trade Janis Cole

http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade

In Tales From the Organ Trade, Ric Bienstock reinforces her hardearned reputation for slipping a camera into impossible places and emerging with gut-­‐wrenching stories of the human condition (Sex Slaves and Impact of Terror, etc). She crafts her latest investigative documentary with the punctiliousness of a surgeon’s scalpel, aiming to unravel a complex ethical quandary behind the growing black market of underpaid kidney donors, select transplant surgeons and desperate recipients. The intimate decisions that three people—who are facing transplants or continued pain and suffering and even death—must make cast a shadow on Canadian laws that prohibit the regulated selling of human organs.

In parts of Ontario, people with kidney disease are on waiting lists of up to 10 years to get a kidney by way of a cadaver or altruistic donor. With the demand of diseased people far outweighing the organ supply, a thriving overseas black market is growing. “In some countries you can pick up a kidney for the price of a laptop,” narrator David Cronenberg states, in just the right tone to shock. This sad reality is exemplified in

the Philippines, where Bienstock easily finds dozens of young men who have willingly sold a kidney to better their lives for only two thousand dollars.

When Raul Fain’s Ontario doctor informs him nothing more can be done for him at home he turns to the overseas market. For $105,000 he purchases a kidney transplant at the Medicus clinic in Kosovo.

Coincidentally the same clinic later becomes the centre of a criminal investigation and a compelling through line in Bienstock’s film. In the media, including the Toronto Star, Fain is portrayed as a carefree and affluent user, and the donor as a coerced victim who wasn’t paid. In the film, Fain comes across as a thoughtful person of average means who made a choice to save his life. And when his donor is found, she says that the $12,000 agreed upon ahead of time was paid, adding that she was pleased to help Raul.

A diseased man in the U.S. aptly describes the life-­‐and-­‐death dilemma he faces: “I have three choices. I get a transplant overseas, I get a transplant in this country, or I die.” He seriously considers the black market and trying other alternative methods that don’t sit well with his grown daughter, who has chosen not to be a donor.

Torontonian Mary Jo Vradis is unabashedly candid about what it’s like to live with kidney disease.

Throughout her 20s she has slept apart from her husband every second night to undergo dialysis that she self-­‐administers in her home to allow a glimmer of normalcy at her job and extra time with her son. Her mother and brother are also waiting for a kidney transplant. Her 53-­‐year-­‐old mother has been waiting 18 years and may never get one. Mary Jo doesn’t want to go overseas but she understands the need: “When something isn’t freely available, a black market exists.” Even if Mary Jo succeeds in getting a kidney transplant, it can’t bring back the quality of life she’s lost in a decade of waiting.

Bienstock has found people whose stories might get doubters thinking differently about the difficult moral issue of regulating kidney sales as a pilot project aimed at saving lives.

HOT DOCS 2013 http://www.thegridto.com/culture/film/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013/

TALES FROM THE ORGAN TRADE 6/10 Dir. Ric Esther Bienstock. 82 min. April 28, 7 p.m., Isabel Bader; April 29, 1 p.m., Lightbox; May 2, 4 p.m., Scotiabank.

David Cronenberg’s flat, deadpan narration brings a weird sort of star power to Ric Esther Bienstock’s exposé of black-­‐market organ transplants. This is horror movie material given a rigorous journalistic treatment, and it works on both a visceral and a political level. The film is disturbing but not sensationalistic, although its multiplicity of storylines in locations across Eastern Europe ultimately leaves it feeling a little too diffuse.—A.N.

Hot Docs 2013 Review: TALES FROM THE ORGAN TRADE Is Wonderfully Nuanced Jason Gorber

http://twitchfilm.com/2013/04/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐review-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐is-­‐wonderfully-­‐nuanced.html

Far too often "issue" films play out as mere polemics, dogmatically reemphasizing a given point of view to a receptive audience. I often find these type of films dreary and intellectually barren, a lazy form of near propaganda that does little to engage with the subject matter at hand.

There are those films, however, that manage with the constraints of a theatrical running time to genuinely shed some fractive light on a subject, illuminating not just the obvious, but the various shades of colour that a given subject represents. Ric Esther Bienstock has crafted such a rare gem of a film.

Narrated by David Cronenberg in delightfully laconic drawl, this documentary tells of the the many sides of the Organ Trafficking debate. We travel to the slums of Phillipines, seeing men so poor they're living beneath another's shack, the ceiling too low to even stand up. Raising a children amongst filth and open sewers, the change to give up a redundant organ for cash is too good to pass up.

We visit Israel, where an unrepentant Nephrologist talks passionately about how he saves lives. We meet people on a donor list that have been waiting patiently for years for a lottery-­‐like chance to the top of the list.

We see daughters wrestling with whether to help ailing fathers, and strangers willing to make the same sacrifice. From international crime tribunals to a spare room in Moldova, the film's international scope underscores the complexity of the story it tells.

By tracing these various paths, and tenaciously tracking down a wide variety of participants, Beinstock is able to allow the audience a real insight into this topic. Forming a kind of James Bond-­‐like travelogue, the doc unfolds in both dramatically and intellectually interesting ways. Funded by television broadcasters including HBO, it nonetheless plays out with the drama and scope of any theatrical feature, and is well worth seeing on the big screen.

The film also does a great job in allowing the participants time to make their case, balancing an effective representation of their beliefs without having them run on. There's some astonishingly frank comments captured with the interviews, demonstrating both the capabilities of the interviewee to elicit the comments, and the dexterity of editing that allows it all to flow without becoming repetitive.

This is an organ trafficking movie with heart, but it never wears it on its sleeve. It is not free from presenting an opinion, yet not shy from showing alternative points of view. It digs through the statistics and headline grabbing stories and traces back to the core of this complex issue, all while proving to be briskly entertaining.

Tales From The Organ Trade is a tale well told, certainly one of the highlights of this year's Hot Docs festival.

Tales from the Organ Trade investigates the black market of organ trafficking

Should people be allowed to sell their organs? That question lingers in Tales from the Organ Trade , a documentary by Toronto’s multiple award-­‐winning filmmaker Ric Bienstock, making its North American premiere at Hot Docs , April 28, 29 and May 2.

Hot Docs 2013: ‘Tales From the Organ Trade’ performs a surgical critique of global inequality David Fiore

http://www.soundonsight.org/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐performs-­‐a-­‐surgical-­‐critique-­‐of-­‐global-­‐inequality/

The prospect of going under the surgeon’s knife terrifies most human beings. And rightly so. Despite the extraordinary theoretical and technological advancements of the past two centuries, no major medical procedure has a 100% success rate. Ultimately though, very few of us would balk at taking this step, if all other options were closed to us. Not even if the disease we were suffering from was poverty.

Ric Esther Bienstock’s incisive documentary lays out all of the grim facts on the table and dares viewers to leave the theatre with their preconceived notions intact. Steering

well clear of sensationalist tales of men and women waylaid by bio-­‐buccaneers who snatch people’s chloroformed kidneys while they sleep, the director tells the stories of those who “willingly” exchange their bodily integrity for another year’s worth of food and shelter for their families. Bienstock takes us to a village in the Philippines where nearly every adult male sports a nephrectomy (kidney removal operation) scar. Through candid interviews, we learn how badly these people (in places around the globe) are counting on continued demand for the only moderately valuable assets they possess – pieces of their own bodies. The sprawling tragedy hits home on a very personal level when we learn that the shooting of this documentary itself may have cost one villager dearly.

The director also presents the plight of Western dialysis patients languishing on interminable organ transplant recipient lists in a very sympathetic light. One man describes his life without a properly functioning kidney as “merely existing” – and a long term dialysis patient in her fifties reveals the atrocious ravages wrought upon her body by this inadequate form of treatment. We meet a Toronto man who made the fateful choice to pay a six-­‐figure sum for a new lease on life – and the internationally reviled team of profiteers (now sought by Interpol) who brokered his illicit operation.

Bienstock’s camera reveals no sneering moustache-­‐twirlers among this group. Tabloid poster-­‐villain Yusuf Somnez, a skilled Turkish surgeon who performed innumerable transplants as a member of the infamous Medicus clinic, comes across as a cultured and reasonably amiable family man who says he was “just practicing his profession” when he removed organs from desperately empty bellies and tucked them snugly into the sanctified sides of his well-­‐to-­‐do patients. Lives were saved, were they not? And the donors had signed consent forms. Legally binding contracts. The backbone of all capitalist enterprise. The film does not offer any explicit judgment of his actions.

Nor does Bienstock pronounce upon the cogency of Interpol’s crusade against the international organ trade. However, when the lead investigator on the Medicus case accuses his targets of “taking advantage of the human condition”, one cannot help but wonder: is obscene economic inequality an intrinsic aspect of the human condition?

Narrator David Cronenberg, no stranger himself to the symbolic use of anatomical pathology, leaves us with the uneasy feeling that international authorities are targeting mere symptoms, rather than the root of the crisis. When humanity at large is compelled by dire economic necessity to throw open the doors of its physiological pantry, the real problem has nothing to do with whether a few pounds of flesh exchange hands in cash-­‐ hallowed raids. It is the bare fact that so many cupboards are empty which should concern us.

Tales From the Organ Trade makes its North American premiere at the Isabel Bader Theatre on April 28 (7 pm). It will also show at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on April 29 (1 pm) and at the Scotiabank Theatre on May 2 (4 pm).

Hot Docs Review: Tales From The Organ Trade Kristal Cooper

http://thetfs.ca/2013/05/02/hot-­‐docs-­‐review-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade/

Are you an organ donor? And by that I mean, have you signed an organ donation card or gone online and put your name on the list in the event of your untimely demise? That’s what most people think of when they think of donating organs but for many poverty-­‐ridden people around the world, organ donation on the black market is a way to quickly give them the cash they need to start a brand new, possibly prosperous, life. Tales From The Organ Trade gives us an inside look at the brokers and doctors who work within the black market, the people who willingly give up a kidney for a mere $2000 and at the recipients who mortgage their homes and travel to another country to get an organ they may never otherwise receive through the proper channels. The film also introduces us to some North Americans who are on the waiting list for a cadaver donor as they look at the other–legal–options that are out there that may get them their much-­‐needed kidney quicker than the estimated 7-­‐8 year wait.

As interesting as this subject is, Tales From The Organ Trade is a bit of a dry watch. Narrated by David Cronenberg, whose smooth, whispery voice is a lullaby waiting to happen, the film sleepily goes back and forth from person to person and as a result it feels like there’s no real centre for the audience to hook into. The most interesting aspect of organ donation was only really touched on at the end, the fact that if there were a way to legally compensate people for willingly donating an organ, the waiting list would all but vanish – that’s a great fact to hang your hat on and exploring the far-­‐reaching implications of that would very naturally lead to the other, less savoury areas of the film currently focuses on. At best, Tales From the Organ Trade is an interesting short film made far less tolerable by its feature-­‐length running time.

Is Tales From The Organ Trade Essential Hot Docs Viewing?

Unless you have a specific interest in the subject matter, this is one you can easily take a pass on.

Hot Docs 2013: ‘Tales From the Organ Trade’ reveals body parts black market Lynne Fenske

http://www.examiner.com/article/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐reveals-­‐body-­‐parts-­‐black-­‐ market

According to the World Health Organization, every hour a human organ is sold on the black market. On Sunday evening a Toronto film audience learned why and how by viewing the North American premiere of “Tales From the Organ Trade” a stunning documentary from Emmy Award-­‐winning director Ric Esther Bienstock.

The film screened at the Isobel Bader Theatre as part of the 20th annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Bienstock wrote, produced and directed the film under the banner of her Toronto-­‐ based production company Associated Producers Ltd.

Bienstock travelled to the Philippines, Turkey, Israel, Moldova, Kosovo, Ukraine, Canada and the United States to capture an uncompromising view of black market organ trafficking. The film reveals the back-­‐ street brokers, rogue surgeons, impoverished donors and desperate recipients who fuel the exploits of human organ commerce.

Operating outside of the law, the shadowy pressures of supply and demand for human organs determine who gets cut, when, where and for what price.

“When I set out to make ‘Tales From the Organ Trade’ I thought I was embarking on a very black and white story of desperation and exploitation,” says director Bienstock. “But this is a morally complex world where the villains often save lives and the medical establishment, helpless, too often watches people die.

Where the victims often walk away content and the buyers of organs, the recipients, return home with a new lease on life.”

As if to add a particular twist of ghoulishness to the film, it was narrated by director David Cronenberg, responsible for famously morbid cinematic brilliance including “Cosmopolis,” “Crash” and “The Fly.” “We loved the idea of having him narrate the documentary,” comments Bienstock, “as a nod to the idea of intelligent discomfort.”

“Tales From the Organ Trade” will be shown on the Global television network sometime this Fall. In the meantime, click here for additional Hot Docs screenings.

Hot Docs 2013: ‘Tales from the Organ Trade’ Review Adam

http://filmpulse.net/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐review/

Film Pulse Score: 8/10

Ric Esther Bienstock’s Tales from the Organ Trade delves deeply into the world of illegal organ trafficking across the globe. While the practice may sound completely deplorable and horrific, the film shows us that it is a two-­‐sided topic, with each side providing strong arguments. The film is narrated by David Cronenberg, director of such greats as Videodrome and The Fly, which was a stroke of genius considering he often explores the human body in his films.

The film takes a mostly objective look at each side of the organ trading coin by speaking with representatives for and against, however it does feel like they find many more people that are pro organ trading, which is a surprise. On one side you have the people donating, brokering, and receiving the illegally traded organs. The film talks to many people, mostly in the Philippines, who have voluntarily given one of their kidneys in order to make some quick cash. For them, selling a kidney is typically the equivalent of one year’s worth of wages. This can provide them with the means to feed their children and even start a business.

The filmmakers also talk with a man who was a recipient of a black market kidney. This is particularly interesting, as he describes the entire process from finding a broker, to traveling to Turkey then Kosovo, to the procedure itself. It’s around this point in the movie that the viewer realizes maybe this organ trading business isn’t so bad.

On the other side, the film speaks with a prosecutor who is attempting to shut these illegal practices down. He highlights the exploitative side of this dirty business and reminds us that the recipient normally pays around $100,000 for a kidney transplant, and only about $2000 goes to the donor. Because these operations are illegal, there’s also the fear that corners are being cut when it comes to the screening process of the donors and the procedure itself.

There are many valid points made by both sides and it’s certainly not the cut and dry topic that I believed it to be before watching this documentary. It’s also quite surprising that the filmmakers got so much cooperation from everyone involved, including from some of the infamous surgeons that are fugitives from Interpol.

On a technical level, this is a fairly standard talking head doc, however the subject matter is simply so fascinating the traditional structure didn’t bother me one bit. There are several slightly chilling scenes that involve men posing in front of the camera showing off their surgery scars, which looked fantastic. The narration by David Cronenberg wasn’t that necessary, however he did a good job and helped us understand the process more clearly.

This is a decidedly difficult topic to film simply because of all the secrecy involved with much of how it works, but it would have been nice if they were able to speak with some additional recipients of organs, or were able to find people that were involved with parts other than the kidneys. While the kidney is by far the most widely traded organ, it seems like this is just scratching the surface.

Tales From the Organ Trade is a fascinating film that exposes a serious problem with organ donation in our world. Donor wait lists have become increasingly long, and people are dying when they could be living full, healthy lives if they only received a kidney. This is an important film simply because how can we evoke change if we don’t know there’s a problem?

Movie Review Tales from the Organ Trade (2013) Trevor Hogg

http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2013/04/movie-­‐review-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐2013.html

SYNOPSIS:

The issue of illegal human organ transplants has a global impact upon the impoverished, the legal and medical professions, and those in desperate need of a life-­‐saving operation.

From the slums of the Philippines to a Toronto urban dwelling, the trafficking of human organs is a worldwide issue. The poor see the selling of their extra kidney as way to obtain financial freedom for their families while those in dire need of the organ spend years of frustration waiting on donor lists. A great effort has been made by documentarian Ric Esther Bienstock

(Sex Slaves) to explore all the players involved including the doctors who are willing to perform operations in devastated countries such as Kosovo. Saving a life does not come cheaply as over $100,000 can be paid by those needing a transplant while the seller can get as little as $1000 for their human sacrifice.

The subject matter is filled with so many grey areas there are no clear villains or heroes. In one way the poor are given a means to rescue themselves from their poverty but in most cases the monetary windfall is squandered. However, one cannot ignore that a life ends up being saved. Seeing the effects of a mother, her son and daughter going through dialysis is heart-­‐ breaking as the blood cleansing process extracts a hefty toll upon their bodies. As for Turkish surgeon Dr. Yusuf Sonmez who has been labelled “Dr. Vulture” and “Dr. Frankenstein” he does not come across as a profiteer of human misery as believed to be by prosecutor Jonathan Ratel. A question is raised: If it is legal to give an organ for free or “altruistic” reasons why is it considered criminal to sell one?

A great amount of credit has to go to Ric Esther Bienstock for the effort to provide multiple perspectives; she is aided by slick graphics which assist in getting the facts across. If there is a weakness in the presentation it is the lack of examination into the seedy areas where butchers rather than highly skilled surgeons perform the operations. The biggest compliment which can be paid to Tales from the Organ Trade is that the documentary sparks a lot of discussion and debate about an issue which is not going to die off anytime soon.

Flickering Myth Rating -­‐ Film: / Movie:

Tales From the Organ Trade Jared Mobarak

http://thefilmstage.com/reviews/hot-­‐docs-­‐review-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade/

With a name like Tales from the Organ Trade and its interesting casting selection of body horror maestro David Cronenberg as its narrator, I’m not sure one could blame me for expecting gruesome, unsanitary, back alley surgeons assisted by frightfully personalized scalpel sets straight out of Dead Ringers‘ repertoire. Doesn’t the logline—“A look into the underground world of trafficking human body parts”— conjure images of shady black market employees traveling the world with an Igloo cooler in hand?

Kidnapping unsuspecting men and women off the streets and leaving them to wake up in an ice bath weak and scarred? This is the image government officials, mainstream media, and even Hollywood would like us to believe. In truth, however, it may not all be so nightmarish.

Director Ric Esther Bienstock isn’t trying to scare us with her documentary; she’s looking to force us into asking morally and ethically challenging questions. I believe she wants the kind of misconceptions I made to attract attention and get an audience to watch what is actually a very in-­‐depth look into the shortcomings of our kidney transplantation system. Focusing on the salaciously covered case of “Dr. Frankenstein”—Turkish surgeon Yusuf Sonmez—Tales from the Organ Trade puts a face to the wealthy patients in need, the “exploited” Third World donators seeking cash compensation, and the medical practitioners willing to put the two together. Sonmez’s Medicus Clinic in Kosovo was a clean, sterile working environment led by an expert craftsman who saved lives. So where is the line separating good and bad?

I guess it comes down to the fact that good and bad don’t play as important a role on this subject as one would initially assume. The concept of giving someone in need an organ you can live without only exists at the moment under the labels of legal and illegal. We’re told an altruistic donation is acceptable but one for financial gain is not. Should this be so black and white a delineation? Sure, black market smugglers shouldn’t be allowed to raid some unsuspecting family’s house and slice them up to steal their flesh, but what about willing participants desperately in need of money to support their family? What about Filipinos Joboy and Eddieboy needing their kidneys to provide for their wives and children? Shouldn’t it be their choice?

It’s an extraordinarily gray area with immeasurable ethical ramifications the powers that be would love to scare us into thinking is a clear-­‐cut, irrefutable decision. I too felt heavily in favor of the law when sitting down for the film until I realized how much more to the debate there was. Lawyers like Jonathan Ratel believe with good reason that Sonmez was at the center of a criminal syndicate preying on the poverty of exploited foreigners never given a choice. And while in other cases this may be true, the evidence acquired by Bienstock has me believing this one may be different. Perhaps Sonmez and his Nephrologist Zaki Shapira were simply doing their jobs to save lives. How could they refuse to operate if the necessary documentation was in order?

We are easily manipulated into believing one side of every story because it is the one shoved down our throats. Whether you find yourself changing your beliefs on the subject or not, Bienstock’s work should be applauded for taking the time and effort to dig deeper and expose the personal tales shoved to the background in lieu of grotesque statistics and skewed morality. I honestly couldn’t definitively tell you what I think because while laws shutdown organ thieves and the other horrific aspects not necessarily spoken about in this film, the knowledge they’re also potentially preventing thousands of people from

living is a travesty. Are activists like Robby Berman hyperbolic in saying waiting lists could disappear as a result of government-­‐sanctioned compensation? Yes, but there’s also some truth to the idea too.

Bienstock on her team have spent years following leads in the Sonmez case as well as regular men and women looking to survive. Whether its filming Torontonian Mary Jo Vradis’ nine-­‐year fight alongside a mother and brother who are also on dialysis; Denver native Walter Rassbach’s search for salvation through a living donor via matchingdonors.com despite his wife’s insistence the “illegal” route is their only shot; or Philadelphian Jason Chamberlain who duped the system to sell his kidney on Craigslist, people backed against a wall will do whatever it takes if the medical world continues to fail them. Just look at the tale of Raul Fain who paid $120,000 to Medicus and lived to appreciate what Sonmez and his Moldovian donor did. There’s no regret, only thanks.

Tales from the Organ Trade lays its topic bare by visiting every avenue involved in this problem. Sure it glosses over some details while increasing exposure to others—what a coup to get Sonmez on camera— but it also never truly takes a side. In fact, one of my favorite aspects of the film is Cronenberg’s voiceover speaking about how “the production team” did something. There is a rare transparency at work that even shows how the film ruined one Filipino’s chance at earning the money needed to overcome his country’s poverty. Bienstock is on a mission to find the truth, give the accused a voice, and show how ambiguous a concept selling one’s body parts is. There are no easy answers and an out-­‐of-­‐sight-­‐out-­‐of-­‐mind philosophy isn’t a solution.

Until you’re faced with the necessity to choose between death, painful waiting, or life for a price, I’m not sure you can justifiably say you have the answer. Regulation probably will never eliminate the black market, but it could save the lives of people on both sides of the equation. The fact the medical branches of our government stands so staunchly against even considering change is a disconcerting notion to reconcile. Right or wrong, allowing citizens of the world to make their own decision isn’t a horrible idea.

Tales from the Organ Trade successfully plants the possibility in our heads to wonder whether a middle ground will one day be reached.

B+

Hot Docs Review: Tales from the Organ Trade Gary

http://www.panicmanual.com/2013/04/28/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐ric-­‐esther-­‐bienstock/

There is a “little known” problem with money: it discourages a holistic valuation from a humane perspective. Everything can be transacted, but not everyone can agree on a fair price. Is it really moral to discourage organ trading while thousands die from conditions that are medically trivial if only given a supply that can match the demand? This is the value that Bienstock’s documentary questions. I can just imagine the Q&A session filled with outraged people with two healthy kidneys.

The title says organ, but the whole film is really about kidney trades. We are all familiar (but hopefully not intimately) with the hotel-­‐ice-­‐bath urban myth which has a genuine root in the skewed supply/demand balance: there’s too many people on dialysis and not enough kidneys for transplantation. Bienstock, a veteran Canadian documentary maker, assembled a cast of characters whose involvement with kidneys cover the spectrum of that balance – except the middlemen. Her attempts at an interview with the cash-­‐ supply of the Medicus operation was obviously met with silence. Frankly, I would question the authenticity (and in equal portion applaud her tenacity) had she succeeded where Interpol failed. But she did get interviews from the doctors involved in one particular case of international organ trafficking, and

scores of donors, successful and waiting transplant patients, some lower-­‐rung local traffickers, as well as prosecutors pursuing the doctors. The flow of the film generally follows two potential donors in the Philippines, but presents switchbacks between the multitude of people and presents kidney trafficking through such an mosaic.

While I feel that Tales is a very good motivational piece, it could have contained a bit more investigative value. The Medicus tangent served as a nice segway into how doctors, patients, donors and the blackmarket trade intersected, but it was not made into a focal point. But maybe I’ve watched one too many Frontline/ProPublica episode. One immediate departure from expectation is that the whole thing doesn’t feel depressing or ominous at all. The tone was clearly defiant, and one would not be confused on where Bienstock stood. It wrapped up with happy endings all around, and even ended with post-­‐texts lambasting NGOs and governments as being politically-­‐correct but factually immoral while Blur’s “Out of time” played as out-­‐tro. It was cleanly edited with a minimal dose of infographics at the introduction. One thing it does well is introduce the audience to the diverse range of opinions – although again I feel that there’s a bias toward the positive. A slightly surprising fact is that in online, ”altruistic” donor matching services, people still prefer to donate to those who are young and with potential. If chivalry is dead, altruism is probably extinct. While many of the participants (except the prosecutors) appear to be somewhat anti-­‐establishment, at one point the Toronto patient on a waiting list (which is of course the longest one in Ontario) said: “Well if it’s not freely available, there’s a black market.” Exactly what compelled her to complain about Lake Ontario not brimming with salvageable renal material wasn’t very clear, but it did demonstrate the frustration of putting one’s life on dialysis for 9 years while your person is being ground through the system. That said, if you deem the legalization of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, homosexual marriage and other liberal propaganda a product of our morally bankrupt society, you might want to stay home and clean your guns with your 6 year-­‐old.

Hot Docs 2013 – April 25 to May 4, 2013: Six More Picks http://www.artandculturemaven.com/2013/04/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐april-­‐25-­‐to-­‐may-­‐4-­‐2013.html

Tales from the Organ Trade – Directed by Ric Esther Bienstock -­‐ North American Premiere Tales From The Organ Trade, by acclaimed documentarian Ric Esther Bienstock (Sex Slaves: aka The Real Sex Traffic, Ebola: Inside an Outbreak), and narrated by David Cronenberg, travels the world, shining a light on what seems a rampant human indignity. The documentary is a gritty and unflinching descent into the shadowy world of black-­‐market organ trafficking: the street-­‐level brokers, the rogue surgeons, the impoverished men and women who are willing to sacrifice a slice of their own bodies for a quick payday, and the desperate patients who face the agonizing choice of obeying the law or saving their lives.

Hot Docs 2013: My Thoughts on Tales From the Organ Trade Sean Kelly

http://www.skonmovies.com/2013/04/hot-­‐docs-­‐2013-­‐tales-­‐from-­‐organ-­‐trade.html

There are people all over the world, who are desperate in need of a new organ to survive. However, there is not enough supply to meet the demand and there are people who end up waiting years for a qualified donor to appear. As such, some people go to extreme measures and spend thousands of dollars to purchase new organs for themselves. Directed by Ric Esther Bienstock and narrated by David Cronenberg, Tales from the Organ Trade takes a look into the world of organ black markets and how there are many shades of grey when it comes to organ donation.

When people are in need of organ donations, they often find themselves waiting for years on donor lists. Mary Jo in Toronto has been waiting for a new kidney for nearly a decade and has been keeping herself alive with a dialysis machine, which she fears will eventually cause her body to deteriorate. In another case, Walter has been on the donor list for two years and fears that he would be dead in less than a decade if he doesn’t find a kidney. Eventually, some people become so desperate that they are willing to mortgage their house and buy organs. This is what a man named Raul did, which resulted in him being put right in the middle of an investigation of one of the world’s most infamous organ trafficking rings.

One of the prime focuses of the film is the case of the Medicus clinic in Kosovo, where many illegal organ transplants were preformed by the Turkish Dr. Sonmez, who was given names like “Dr. Vulture” and “the Turkish Frankenstein” by the media and he is one of Europe’s most wanted men. They key point of this investigation is whether or not the organs used with stolen, as accused, or given by willing donors. Raul, who received a new kidney from Sonmez, showed absolutely no regret about his decision, even after authorities included him in their investigations. Some of the key figures of this case are located and interviewed and it is quite interesting what they have to say.

There is a very high organ trade in the Philippines, especially within the Quezon province. The main motivation for people in the Philippines selling their organs is to help them get out of poverty. Of course, there is a downside to this. One individual in the film found out that he had a diseased kidney after donating and now required a donor himself. Since the kidney was likely diseased beforehand, it would likely caused problems for the unknowing recipient. It is definitely quite sad that so many people in the Philippines have to resort to this route to get money. Even sadder is the fact that the black market dealers have many prospective clients and can switch to someone else without notice.

The film also tackles the subject of altruistic donors, who voluntarily donate organs to people in need. There are some who are calling for a government regulated system, which will help compensate such donors. However, as soon as money becomes involved, the ethics of organ donations becomes much more complicated, which is why such transactions are considered illegal. Thankfully, a “one in a million” altruistic donor leads to a happy ending for one of the subjects of the film.

Over, I thought that Tales from the Organ Trade brought up some very interesting issues when it came to organ donations. There definitely needs to be a better way to find organ donors, so perspective recipients don’t find themselves waiting on a list for nearly a decade. Authorities constantly going after organ trafficking rings end up doing nothing in the long run, expect drive the black market further underground. If people are allowed to willing donate their organs and get compensated for doing so, it might help to put an end to this problem.

Tales from the Organ Trade: A New Documentary via Simcha Jacobovici James Tabor

http://jamestabor.com/2013/05/01/tales-­‐from-­‐the-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐a-­‐new-­‐documentary-­‐via-­‐simcha-­‐jacobovici/

Among my colleagues in the field of Biblical Studies Simcha Jacobovici is seen as one who does documentaries on the Bible, archaeology, and the history of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. In fact his company, Associated Producers, has produced a wide variety of films with many prestigious awards including three Emmy’s for “Best Documentary.” The latest, which is making its way around the festivals and will air later on HBO, is titled “Tales from the Organ Trade.”

It is controversial and a bit difficult to watch. You can read more about the controversy here, and watch the trailer below. On second thought this has everything to do with “all things Biblical,” the theme of my blog, see the refrain through the Hebrew Prophets about “crushing the heads of the poor” and the repeated calls for justice and righteousness (Isaiah 3:15; Amos 8:3).

Tales From The Organ Trade (2013) Hot Docs 2013 Steve Kopian

http://unseenfilms.blogspot.ca/2013/04/tales-­‐from-­‐organ-­‐trade-­‐2013-­‐hot-­‐docs.html

Think of it this way-­‐ I do something Illegal and I save hundreds of lives. You do something legal and hundreds of people die-­‐ Activist in Brooklyn arguing that people should be able to sell their organs

Food for thought and then some...

This is the story of the illegal organ trade. This is the story, or stories of the poor of the world who literally sell part of themselves for some quick cash (perhaps the equivalent of several years salary all for a kidney or some other organ) and the people who buy them or facilitate the transfer.

I honestly have no idea where to begin.The film starts in the Philippines where there is a

booming business in Organ sales. Its illegal of course, unless you give the organ away you can't dispose of any of your body parts, but people do it with regularity. Here the film follows a couple of perspective donors (one of which who just wants to get a home and not a crawl space to live in) and a broker who has helped several people sell their organs including many in her family.

We follow several people in need in the US and Canada, and what they have to go through by playing by the rules.

We also get to see the story of a Canadian man who had a transplant on the black market and is nor embroiled in the middle of legal proceedings against the people who helped him. (We also meet the doctors and prosecutors in the case).

A solid little documentary that for the most part lays out the situation concerning waiting for an organ and the moral stance that prevents people from selling theirs to people in need. Actually the film spends a great deal of time with the ridiculous double standard of you can give someone an organ but you can't sell one and shows us where that all leads (The death of 118 people during the running time of the film)

For the most part the film is not a be all and end all documentary on the subject it is arguing in favor of some sort of regulation by laying out the facts and tells the stories, iincluding one family where a mother and her kids are all on dialysis for years (we see the result of 20 years on the machines) and lets you sort things out...

The minor problem with the film is that it isn't scrupulously fair minded since it's arguing that we should allow sales, with the negative side of organ sales are not really dealt with. We get one story of one donor who's remaining kidney is failing and found out that they have have had kidney disease for years, meaning the person who got their kidney got a bad one. The point being that had the testing been better this would never have happened (other problems are either glossed over or reduced to hearsay). The film also never deals with what might happen if sales were allowed other than lives would be saved.

One sidedness aside the film is actually extremely thought provoking, so much so that I was almost an hour in before I realized that they weren't really dealing with the negative and it didn't bother me. There is simply too much material to digest just to begin to discuss the subject that it's understandable if things aren't completely covered.

Actually there is so much here to take in that I can't wait to see it again when it shows up on HBO (since they financed it).

A must see film about a serious moral issue.

Tales from the organ trade Crane and Matten

http://craneandmatten.blogspot.ca/2013/04/tales-­‐from-­‐organ-­‐trade.html

Imagine that you live in poverty. A chance arises for you to earn a year's salary in one day. All being well, no one will get hurt. In fact, what you're going to do will save someone's life. Sounds like quite a deal. Or at least it does until until you realize that what we're talking about here is selling one of your kidneys. And that it's illegal almost everywhere.

The decision to sell an organ is a stark choice. It speaks so much of all that is wrong with our global inequities. It shouldn't be happening. But, like it or not, it does happen. For many people looking to get out of poverty, the sale of one of their organs is clearly a desperate choice ... but it is also a choice that they are sometimes willing to make.

The illegal organ trade is not for the faint hearted. Sure, it saves lives, but it's an ugly business. Ric Esther Bienstock, the documentary-­‐maker behind the award winning "Sex Slaves" documentary about global sex trafficking has taken on the subject head first and eyes open with her new film, Tales from the Organ Trade. It's getting it's North American premiere tonight here in Toronto at the Hot Docs festival. We sat down with her recently to find out exactly what lay behind her decision to focus on such a moral minefield and to ask what she's trying to achieve.

"I'm not advocating for incentivised donation. That door is shut. But I'd love the film to

spark debate" says Bienstock. Unlike Sex Slaves, Tales from the Organ Trade doesn't take any sides. As Bienstock says, "sex trafficking is a very black and white issue". But making Tales from the Organ Trade took Bienstock into a lot of grey areas. "It shook me up," she admits. "When I started making the film I had a very different view from when I finished making the film. I started off thinking, its purely exploitative, period. And that's 90% of how it's characterised in media reports, films, and anything I've seen.... but there are thinkers out there, surgeons and ethicists who think that a regulated, incentivised system is the way to go. And there are people who think it is repulsive and exploitative.

So I really have a sense of what they all believe, and why they believe that."

The turnaround for Bienstock was going to countries like the Philippines, Ukraine and Moldova and meeting donors. The fact is, she says, so many of the people she met were not coerced. They actively sought out the brokers who would find them a buyer. "You don't need to coerce people in the Philippines," she argues. If they are coerced, she says, they are, as she puts it, "effectively coerced by their own poverty." And what is more, they are forced into the black market, where there are virtually no protections. "If you think about it," she says, "it's a situation where you have extremely desperate people on both sides, crashing together in a black market." It's a situation ripe for exploitation.

Bienstock took more than 3 years to make the film, crisscrossing the world to talk to the different people involved in the organ trade, from donors and recipients, to the brokers and surgeons that make it all happen. Although these characters are operating outside the law, and are often portrayed as evil, exploitative crooks, Bienstock had little trouble finding them -­‐ and again, saw them as much more complicated than the typical black-­‐ and-­‐white narratives. But getting them to give their side of the story to camera was much more difficult.

One doctor wanted by Interpol only agreed to be filmed after his mother had approved of Bienstock following a lunch date in Istanbul. Another only agreed after Bienstock had flown to Israel to meet him for coffee. "The first thing he said to me", recounts Bienstock, "is I'm not going to be in your film." He eventually agreed after Bienstock convinced him that she wasn't out to vilify him; she simply wanted his side of the story.

Tales from the Organ Trade ends up being powerful for resolutely avoiding taking sides.

Rare among documentaries tackling such sensationalist subjects, it doesn't look to reinforce prejudices but invites us to make up our minds. This may make for uncomfortable viewing, but it's a necessary approach to a subject that often defies conventional ethical logic. As the film's publicity materials put it: "This is a world where the villains often save lives and the medical establishment, helpless, too often watches people die. Where the victims often walk away content and the buyers of organs -­‐ the recipients -­‐ return home with a new lease on life "

Publicity handled by GAT PR