Film Analysis Essay on Dying To Survive: Desperate Measures For a Desperate Man

Introduction

Dying to Survive is a Chinese movie that was produced in 2018 by Ning Hao and Xu Zheng. The plot features a protagonist, Cheng Yong, a struggling businessman. For a long time, his business has not been making profits and is sinking in debts. His father has leukemia and needs a lot of money for surgery, which his family cannot afford. One day, a man comes to Yong's shop and convinces him to import cheap drugs from India for cancer treatment in exchange for a large sum of money. The Swiss drug in China is costly, and most people with leukemia cannot afford it. However, in India, there is a cheap generic version of the drug. Since Cheng is desperate for money, he makes a deal with the man and agrees to smuggle the drugs from India. Chong gets a lot of money and becomes wealthy from the many customers who purchase the medications. Chong is happy to see his clients have hope for the future after spending all their money on treatment and purchase of expensive drugs in China. However, the police become aware of the sale of contraband drugs, and Chong is arrested. The police start a crackdown to discover the unlicensed cancer treatment drugs, and the Indian government is sued for infringing its patients.

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Various cultural aspects are depicted in the movie Dying to Survive. For instance, there are challenges of every day cultural life, family, stigma, and humor. As illustrated in the film, the protagonist is a shopkeeper who sells ointments in an Indian shop and has an ailing father. The family cannot help since cancer drugs are too expensive in this country. Many more families like that of Cheng are also suffering since the treatments are dragging people to poverty. As a result, one of the social issues that arise from the situation is stigma. The affected families are helpless, and once they hear of the availability of a cheaper drug, they go for it straight away. The protagonist uses dark humor to depict a heartbreaking story of his ailing father and other leukemia patients in China.

The theme of self-making and ethical subjectivism is also depicted in the movie. Ethical subjectivism means that moral values are dependent on will, whether human or divine. The protagonist's primary objective for importing the cheap drugs from India to China was to gain wealth and become rich. However, at one point, he had a change of heart when he realized that the happiness of his clients was more valuable than money. Although the police finally arrested him, Cheng committed a crime to benefit people in the society who could not afford cancer drugs.

The impact of history and politics on everyday life is also a theme in Dying to survive. As seen in the movie, there is a long history of cancer patients in China. Their numbers continue to rise every day, and many continue to suffer because they cannot afford necessary medications. Legislators in the Chinese government have discussed the issue of expensive cancer drugs and treatment. The movie is a wake-up call for the government to make treatment more affordable and save the lives of many of its citizens (Li et al., 2018).

My response and thought about the film is that it is a call for the Chinese government to make cancer drugs in the country cheaper for citizens to afford them. In my opinion, the movie tries to push for broader awareness of the frustrations that cancer patients who cannot afford treatment drugs go through. The issue about cancer drug prices in China continues to bring about heated debates, and there were three cabinet meetings before July in 2018 regarding the same matter. In China alone, more than four million cancer cases are reported every year, and out of those, about three million patients succumb (Li et al., 2018). Although most of the Chinese population is insured, the coverage only focusses on basic medical care and excludes many cancer treatments and drugs. The burden is then left to the families of the patient who use all the money to pay for treatment, a condition that drags them into poverty (Li et al., 2018). The movie is meant to generate public awareness to urge the government to reduce the prices to save more lives and reduce poverty and burdens for families in China.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Dying to Survive is a movie that features Cheng Yong, a shopkeeper in an Indian shop. Yong's father is ailing and cannot afford treatment. When Chong is given the idea of smuggling contraband drugs to treat leukemia, he takes the job and sells the drugs to the locals. He becomes rich but later changes his mind set upon realizing that saving lives is more important. Various cultural aspects like challenges of everyday life family, stigma, and humor are depicted in the movie. The theme of self-making and ethical subjectivism is also depicted in the film, whereby the protagonist changes his mindset after getting rich. The impact of history and politics on everyday life is also a theme since there is a long history of cancer patients in China. My response and thought about the film is that it is a call for the Chinese government to make cancer drugs in the country cheaper for citizens to afford them. In my opinion, the movie tries to push for broader awareness of the frustrations that cancer patients who cannot afford treatment drugs go through.

References

Li, N., Zheng, B., Cai, H. F., Yang, J., Luo, X. F., Weng, L. Z., ... & Liu, M. B. (2018). Cost effectiveness of imatinib, dasatinib, and nilotinib as first-line treatment for chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia in China. Clinical drug investigation, 38(1), 79-86.