DYING TO SURVIVE

An aphrodisiac peddler, Cheng Yong is in financial trouble. His store has not been making profits for a long time and his father urgently needs money for brain surgery. One day a man wearing thick layers of surgical masks comes to his shop and asks Cheng to bring from India a special inexpensive generic version of the Swiss drug Imatinib, too expensive to be afforded by most leukemia patients in China. Desperate for money, Cheng agrees to risk smuggling the drug into China. Cheng became rich, however, his motivation started to change after he witnessed devastated patients whose family has been pushed into poverty by costly cancer treatments. At the same time, Chinese police noticed the availability of the contraband and vowed to crackdown on the unlicensed generic drug, as the originator company Novartis sued the Indian government for infringing its patent. The film was presented at the Asian Film Awards 2019, Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards 2018, China Film Critics Association Award 2018, Golden Horse Film Festival 2018, Huading Award 2019, Shanghai Film Critics Awards 2019 and Udine Far East Film Festival 2019.

Muye Wen (1985) is a Chinese film director, screenwriter and editor. He graduated from the Beijing Film Academy with a Master’s degree in creative directing and he is a contracted director of Dirty Monkey 72 Transformations Film Project. He has directed the short films “Hope” (2005), “In the Warm Sunshine” (2006), “103” (2007), “Stone” (2010) and “Battle” (2012) which participated in the short film competition at Hong Kong International Film Festival. This was followed by “Cities of Love” (2015) and “Requiem” (2014), which was nominated in the International Short Films Competition Section of Locarno International Film Festival.