Progress

“Poverty causes illness” – this fact is what the commercial “Progress” builds social awareness about, in connection with the appeal that everybody deserves health. In order to illustrate this message, the commercial plays with fascinating surreal-beauty images such as time lapse recording of sprawling excrescence, symbolising the world of viruses and bacteria. However, no matter how fascinating the beauty of the tremendousness and how encouraging the voice-over – the end is disenchanting. While medical science has eliminated killers such as small pox, typhus and plague, it is powerless against the most serious cause of disease: poverty. This is conveyed in the last shot of the film by showing an elderly man’s haggard face that suddenly crystallises statically out of the visual flow of sensuously dynamic animation. Specifically cultured viruses were used for the animated sequences and elaborately shot in a special medical studio. Statement by the jury »The outstanding achievement of this film is that it condenses the complex topic into a highly dramatic narrative. Both sound and images are aesthetically convincing and latently disconcerting. The film refrains from forcefully imposing multi-layered meanings but instead lets them arise in the minds the viewers.«