Director Kief Davidson brings his film, OPEN HEART, to BYOD and shares the difficult journey of Africans to get treatment for their rheumatic heart disease in the Sudan. Kief shares what brought him to tell the story that is often ignored.

Kief also talks with us about the frequency of minor ailments going untreated to turn into rheumatic heart disease, and the near impossible journey for sufferers to get the medical attention they need.

Kief Davidson (Director & Producer)recently completed OPEN HEART, which took him and a small crew to the heart of Rwanda and Sudan. They followed eight children on a perilous journey to get high-risk surgery at Africa’s only high-tech, free-of-charge heart surgery hospital. He is concurrently filming a companion film about Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization Partners In Health, executive produced by Matt Damon and Damon Lindelof in collaboration with the Sundance Institute, Skoll Foundation and Tribeca Gucci.

He’s had international success from the award-winning feature-length documentaries, Kassim the Dream and The Devil’s Miner.

FILM SYNOPSIS:

OPEN HEART is the story of eight Rwandan children who leave their families behind and embark on a life-or-death journey to receive high-risk open-heart surgery in Africa’s only free-of-charge, state-of-the-art cardiac hospital, the Salam Center run by Emergency, an Italian NGO.

While heart disease is often associated with the excesses of Western nations, severe cardiac diseases requiring surgery are extremely prevalent in resource-poor Sub-Saharan Africa.

Because medical treatment is often unavailable, minor maladies like strep throat are often left untreated, and lead to a host of complications, including rheumatic fever, which – especially in young children and teenagers – can permanently damage the heart valves.

There are an estimated 18 million people afflicted with rheumatic heart disease and in need of urgent surgery, almost two thirds of them children, and the disease kills 300,000 people per year. Despite those facts, the Salam Center remains the only facility in Africa capable of such high-standard cardiac surgery, free of charge.

At once a marvel of modern medical engineering and the triumph of an idea, Salam is key in Emergency’s plan to treat and reduce heart diseases in an area three times the size of Europe and home to 300 million people. Building a world-class, technologically advanced cardiac diagnostics and surgery facility in the middle of a desert in Northern Sudan is an impressive feat on its own. Making its services free (including lifelong regimens of prescription drugs and follow-up visits) to anyone who steps through its doors is just shy of revolutionary.