A Billion Lives: first reviews (the director is "super cute")
Saturday, May 14, 2016 at 11:42 The self-styled pro-vaping, anti-corruption documentary A Billion Lives had its world premiere in New Zealand on Wednesday.
If I appear a little obsessed by this film it's because I am. I have a professional interest in the subject but I'm also drawn to independent projects like this.
The promotion of a small budget anti-establishment movie intrigues me and it was strangely exciting to follow director Aaron Biebert and his family and crew to Wellington and experience, even from a distance of 11,500 miles, the opening night on Periscope.
I'm such a stalker that I even watched, via Twitter, a clip of their plane landing in New Zealand.
Of course I have serious reservations about the film and while it would be unfair to leap to conclusions before I see it the first reviews confirm my fears.
Lavishing the film with praise, one reviewer described A Billion Lives as "like the Fahrenheit 9/11 of tobacco". That alone should set alarm bells ringing but consider this.
We were promised a film that would explore alleged corruption in government, public health and even the pharmaceutical industry. A Billion Lives may do all those things but here's what the first reviewers chose to highlight:
Becky: I’m a smoker and if nothing else, I’ve learned I cannot trust the tobacco industry or any big business involved in my healthcare.
Ryan: Since the tobacco industry used to lie about the dangers of smoking – denying their knowledge of that fact for decades before being held accountable for it – they have proven themselves untrustworthy and corrupt. How can anyone believe anything they say or those they influence?
Becky: Watching this movie makes it obvious that the tobacco industry and our government just think we’re all a bunch of shmucks who will believe anything. It makes you feel like they have zero respect for our ability to make sound decisions about our health, based on facts.
A second review headlined A Billion Lives has world premiere in New Zealand, revealing powerful forces aiding the tobacco industry appears to confirm that message:
Filmmaker Aaron Biebert ... journeyed to 13 countries on four continents to find similar patterns worldwide: here is a life-saving technology of e-cigarettes, but governments were banning them or fining citizens over their use, ignoring the science and deciding to be complicit with the tobacco industry in keeping people addicted to a harmful product.
Look, I don't want to come across as an apologist for the tobacco industry. Goodness knows the tobacco companies have done some dumb things in the past but in 2016 Big Tobacco is not the problem, it's part of the solution, or should be.
One of the locations where Biebert filmed was the "vaper-friendly" Global Forum on Nicotine in Warsaw. I understand he conducted a number of interviews when he was there last year but did he make any attempt to interview some of the tobacco company representatives who were there too?
Surely this would have been a great opportunity to get some comments straight from the horse's mouth? Instead, according to this second review, "the pro-smoking side was represented through historical clips".
Likewise, as he went from country to country, did Biebert interview any smokers who don't want to quit? Again, according to this review, "Vaping essentially allows one to get the pleasure of nicotine without the harm of the tar and toxins."
It's very easy to be critical of the tobacco industry if you accept the myth that every consumer is addicted to nicotine and vaping allows people to transfer that addiction to a less harmful product, but it ignores something else – the pleasure of smoking.
Nicotine is a factor in people's addiction to or enjoyment of smoking but there are other factors, as readers of this blog have confirmed many times.
Anyway, read the first reviews of A Billion Lives for yourself. I'm trying hard to keep an open mind, I really am, but it's not easy.
The director sounds nice, though:
Becky: Aaron is ... refreshingly Milwaukeean; sincere and doe-eyed. He seems naturally unrehearsed in his delivery, which I appreciated as a thinking and analytical person who is not receptive to preaching. I don’t want to be told what to think, and although he had a clear opinion, I did not feel any urgency from him to blindly agree with him. Instead, I saw him as a human being with an earnest interest in learning more.
Ryan: He’s real. Midwesterners are known to be welcoming and kind and he effuses those qualities.
Becky: He’s also super cute.
I wonder if they'll put that on the poster ... Better than "People are going to die".
PS. I've just noticed that director Aaron Biebert has commented on a previous post (No UK premiere for A Billion Lives (yet). Why not?)
Given this post it's only fair I include his comments here too:
Simon, I'm starting to like you. Thanks for all the advice and support.
I also wanted to clarify that the official announcement was this one, not your screenshot.
You'll be happy to know that our sold out world premiere at the Oscar-qualifying DocEdge film festival was a great success.
Seems like everyone had a fun night out. We were thrilled to see Sir Richard Taylor, politicians, athletes, doctors, and others join us.
Check out our Facebook page to learn more about what the critics are saying now.
Thanks, Aaron. I'm beginning to like you too. Jury is out on your film, though.
Reader Comments (7)
Shafted by vapers yet again.
Pat, indeed. Disappointing if the film doesn't focus on the evils of Tobacco Control. After all, it was Tobacco Control that shafted research into safer forms of smoking in the 70s and 90s (including heat-not-burn technology which is now coming back, thanks to the popularity of vaping), NOT the tobacco industry who were actively seeking safer alternatives. And it is Tobacco Control which has pushed for the various vaping bans and taxes and restrictions etc which now plague vapers and encourage them to smoke analogues. Both of these actions stem from TC's sociopathy about smoking, anything that resembles smoking and their assertion that "There is no such thing as a SAFER cigarette" rather than, as they should be, being focused on harm reduction.
Simon is right - the tobacco companies were undoubtedly guilty of lies, obfuscation and indeed harm to health with their "damage control" efforts in the 60s. But they have been seeking to improve their products for over 50 years now, with one of the main reasons they are still selling traditional analogues being Tobacco Control's efforts to hinder such research, preferring instead to seek out absolute prohibition. Tobacco Control have arguably cost more lives that the tobacco companies themselves.
So where does all this nicotine they are vaping come from?
Little Tobacco? Good Tobacco?
Could it possibly be China?
State Tobacco Monopoly Administration
"The China National Tobacco Corporation was founded in January 1982. The State Council issued the "Rules on Tobacco Monopoly" in September 1983, setting forth the national tobacco monopoly system officially. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration was established in January 1984. The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress approved the Law of the People's Republic of China on Tobacco Monopoly in June 1991. The State Council issued the Rules for Implementation of the Law of the People's Republic of China on Tobacco Monopoly in July 1997. The issuance and implementation of the laws and regulations further enhance and improve the national tobacco monopoly system. Currently, the industry covers 33 provincial tobacco monopoly administrations and companies, including those in Shenzhen and Dalian, 16 companies, 57 industrial enterprises, over 1,000 commercial enterprises, and companies specialized in leaf tobacco, cigarette selling, cigarette-making machinery, materials, imports and exports, as well as other institutions, with a total force of 510,000 employees."
That sounds pretty big to me.
In my view, part of the the problem is that the socialists who dominate our society and especially the media in all its forms are conservative, narrow minded and for want of a better word, in many cases, thick.
They like easy certainties, so the public health good, tobacco industry evil simplification suits them. The idea that tobacco control might be dishonest and that tobacco companies can be, and in my view should have been encouraged to be part of any "solution" conflicts with their dogma but more importantly requires a degree of open minded genuinely progressive thinking that they are simply incapable of.
I suspect that Mr Biebert may be well intentioned but has found it easier to work from a cosy reactionary perspective than to produce anything genuinely progressive or challenging.
You might be surprised...
“ ... governments were ... deciding to be complicit with the tobacco industry ...”
After the several decades that Governments’ public health departments have spent strenuously distancing themselves from Big Tobacco and working very hard trying to prove how much they hate the industry, I don’t think that description is going to win vapers any friends in the Public Health movement. In fact, if I were one of those members of PH who had been supporting vapers and vaping as a “smoking cessation aid” I think I’d feel a bit backstabbed by that one.
And here we all were thinking that vapers were trying to make Public Health into their New Best Friends. It’s actually quite amusing when one set of anti-smokers starts attacking another set. Reminds me of one of those comedy Irish pub brawls you used to see in old films where everyone just starts busting chairs over the heads of anyone else who’s within reach, even if they’re nothing to do with the original fight. If this film’s anything like that, I might even go to see it! [Thinks for a second] Nah, maybe not.
I find it interesting that you have written a negative review of this film without even viewing it. It isn't about condemning Big Tobacco. It has do do with how Big Pharma and Big Tobacco Control have disseminated gross distortions and outright lies to influence pubic perception and government policy on vaping and vaping products.