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Health

A visually rich documentary packs a punch about how we see disease

Dis-Ease by Mariam Ghani uses strong visuals and compelling interviews to argue that how we see and describe disease affects how we deal with it, says Simon Ings

By Simon Ings

14 August 2024

Anopheles gambiae, collected in Mauritius, in the 1950s. image shot by Mariam Ghani in the storage facility of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, The mosquitoes belong to a US Army collection of insects that is stored in that site.

Mosquitoes have become part of a double-edged “war on disease” narrative

Mariam Ghani/Indexical Films


Mariam Ghani 
Distribution pending

There aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments in Mariam Ghani’s documentary about our war on germs. But the sight of two British colonial hunters in former Ceylon bringing down a gigantic papier mâché mosquito is a highlight.

Ghani intercuts such public information films (a rich source of inadvertent comedy) with monster movies, documentaries, thrillers, newsreels and histology lab footage to tell the story of an abiding medical metaphor: the body as citadel, beset by germs.

Dis-Ease, which began life as an…

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