Three needles

Directed by Thom Fitzgerald; running time 123 minutes

US release date 1 December 2006; UK release date unconfirmed

http://3-needles.com

Rating:****

Three continents. One battle. Three Needles, the latest offering from the Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald, depicts three short stories that offer different perspectives on the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS. This far reaching epic traverses Asia, Africa, and North America and scrutinises many issues, including poverty, half truths, greed, cultural beliefs, abuse, and religion in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

Uneasy truths

The first tale in this harrowing and thought provoking trio is that of the heavily pregnant Jin Ping (Lucy Liu) and is set in China. Jin establishes a mobile blood donor clinic in the small, rural village of Tonghu, where she pays the impecunious villagers $5 (£2.60; €3.90) for each donation. Although she claims that the blood collected will be used in government hospitals, in reality she is illegally trading with private doctors and compromises patient safety by failing to comply with safe methods of collecting blood.

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Three needles; one commonthread

Tong Sam, a local farmer who is ill with flu, is banned from selling his blood until he recovers. After witnessing the new found prosperity of his neighbours, he resorts to lying about his daughter's age so that she can sell blood in his place. He forces his daughter to donate twice a month despite her deteriorating physical condition. Tong invests the money in the family farm, planting more crops and buying an ox. By harvest time, Tong's crop is bigger than ever before, but he has had to pay a terrible price: his wife and daughter have succumbed to the HIV virus.

Tong heads to the city in search of answers from the government. Without success he returns home to find his village has been completely overwhelmed with AIDS. Jin, having realised the results of her reckless actions, packs up her blood collection service and disappears without a trace.

Get rich quick

The second story, although different, also shows the reckless disregard of another character. Denny (Shawn Ashmore) makes his living as a pornographic film star in Montreal and must have regular HIV tests to maintain his job. Unlike his fellow actors, however, Denny is HIV positive. Using blood from his bed bound geriatric father, Denny fakes his tests and presents fraudulent paperwork to his producers.

With the death of his father, Denny's fraud is exposed, and his family, who were dependent on his income, become impoverished. His waitress mother, fearing that she will be unable to afford the long term care her son would need, is driven to extreme measures to ensure financial security. She devises a get rich quick scheme and invests all her life savings in an upgraded life insurance policy. She then knowingly exposes herself to the HIV virus. She sells her life insurance policy, making millions of dollars in the process.

The final story in Three Needles is about a young nun, Sister Clara (Chloe Sevigny), who is working as a missionary with the Pondo people in a remote South African village. Clara and two fellow missionaries run a clinic to convert the dying patients with AIDS to Catholicism, to save their souls from purgatory.

Clara's naivety and hope draw her away from her mission, and she becomes entangled in a struggle to help a family of orphaned children. She is forced to make a desperate bargain with the affluent and dishonest plantation owner, Mr Hallyday, when one of the children in her care is raped by a villager who believes that this might cure him. Clara finds herself battling against the poorly educated natives, consumed by half truths. To her frustration she realises that traditional methods only get you so far and is forced to sacrifice her own salvation for the greater good of protecting the children.

Poignant mutations

On first consideration Three Needles seems rather disjointed and poorly pieced together. Only on further examination do you realise it is intricately laid together, like an elaborate mosaic. Although the characters' paths never cross, the stories are inexorably linked by the circumstances of the plague that infiltrates each character's life, as well as their individual beliefs.

Thom Fitzgerald does beautifully what he set out to do: "We all know that a virus mutates with exposure to other life forms, and in these stories I want to explore how people mutate as a result of their exposure to the virus." In all three stories this personal mutation is evident.

Three Needles premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and has had several prerelease screenings around the world, including at the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations meeting in Serbia in August this year. It was shown there as part of the week long Health as a Human Right film festival. The US release date is aptly 1 December 2006-world AIDS day.

You should see this film as it deals with many of the less publicised aspects of HIV. Three Needles is a compelling film that highlights some of the darker truths of this catastrophic pandemic.