UPDATES
Many thanks to the 246 funders who helped us raise over $50,000 to finish ESCAPE FIRE and prepare it for our premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival! We had an unbelievable experience in Park City, showing the film to five sold-out crowds. Sundance Senior Programmer David Courier said ESCAPE FIRE is "destined to be hailed as the definitive film on American healthcare." At this point, we are speaking with distributors, but want to begin another grassroots effort to raise money for our website and outreach campaign.


WHAT WE NEED
We need to raise $50,000 to launch our nation-wide outreach campaign. The International Documentary Association is acting as our fiscal sponsor, which means that all contributions will be tax-deductible.

Every dollar we collect goes a long way towards getting the message of this film into the public dialogue. In addition to traditional channels of distribution, we've already garnered considerable interest from hospitals, medical schools, national consumer groups, businesses, and political groups who want to screen ESCAPE FIRE. It's important to us that our audience be able to participate in the conversation, so we'll invite them to interact with our website and Facebook page, aggregating the data as they submit their own stories and ideas.

Please continue donating even after we've reached our goal! We will continue to award perks until the campaign ends. Your donations are very much appreciated and every penny truly does count.


THE IMPACT
The goal of ESCAPE FIRE is to help change the national conversation about 21st century healthcare by producing an entertaining feature-length documentary, website and outreach campaign. Stylistically, it is a hybrid film with leading expert voices carrying the narrative, punctuated by emotionally powerful human stories. These stories will be told through cinematic HD footage shot by award-winning DP Wolfgang Held, animation, archival footage, all set to the music of Moby and an original score by Chad Kelly.

The filmmakers hope ESCAPE FIRE is just the beginning of a larger outreach effort - a conversation starter to stimulate discussion and debate in medical school classrooms, hospital cafeterias, doctors' offices, workplaces, boardrooms, government offices and, most importantly, in living rooms across America. It will be a vehicle to engage healthcare leaders and empower individual healthcare consumers in the national debate about the future of medicine. Health and healthcare are truly intertwined and represent one of the most precious and vital of human rights.

The filmmakers, Susan Froemke and Matthew Heineman, have a long history of making films on some of the most pressing social issues of our time, such as poverty, addiction, and hospice care. Most recently, they collaborated with a team at HBO on the groundbreaking, Emmy-nominated series, THE ALZHEIMER'S PROJECT.


FILM OVERVIEW
ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: how can we save our badly broken healthcare system? American healthcare costs are rising so rapidly that they could reach $4.2 trillion annually, roughly 20% of our gross domestic product, within ten years. We spend $300 billion a year on pharmaceutical drugs - almost as much as the rest of the world combined. We pay more, yet our health outcomes are worse. About 65% of Americans are overweight and almost 75% of healthcare costs are spent on preventable diseases that are the major causes of disability and death in our society.

It's not surprising that healthcare tops many Americans' concerns and is at the center of a political firestorm in our nation's Capitol. But the current battle over cost and access does not ultimately address the root of the problem: we have a disease-care system, not a healthcare system.

ESCAPE FIRE examines the powerful forces maintaining the status quo, a medical industry designed for quick fixes rather than prevention, for profit-driven care rather than patient-driven care. After decades of resistance, a movement to bring innovative high-touch, low-cost methods of prevention and healing into our high-tech, costly system is finally gaining ground. This film follows dramatic human stories as well as leaders fighting to transform healthcare at the highest levels of medicine, industry, government, and even the US military. ESCAPE FIRE is about finding a way out. It's about saving the health of a nation.


THE FILMMAKERS
The film is being directed and produced by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke. With a team at HBO, the filmmakers collaborated for two years on the groundbreaking, Emmy-nominated HBO series, THE ALZHEIMER'S PROJECT, which aired in May 2009.

Heineman recently completed OUR TIME ‚ a feature documentary about what it's like to be young in today's America, which premiered on the Documentary Channel in 2011 and simultaneously on numerous digital platforms. He has also directed a number of short films and commercials. Froemke is a four-time Emmy Award winner with more than thirty documentary films to her credit, from the classic GREY GARDENS (1976) to LALEE'S KIN (2001), an HBO film on poverty that earned her an Academy Award nomination. Froemke was the principal filmmaker at the legendary Maysles Films in New York for over two decades. Well-known as a leader in documentary film, she has made seven films for HBO and thirteen films for PBS. Four films have been theatrically distributed and eleven have had worldwide TV distribution.


OTHER WAYS YOU CAN HELP
Healthcare affects everyone, please encourage your friends and loved ones to donate to this project.

Join the movement on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/escapefire