The documentary follows one community’s fight for survival against Ebola through the eyes of Liberians on the frontlines battling to bring the outbreak to an end. The film follows four characters over the course of three months in their struggles against the disease.

Mabel and her team are spearheading the fight against the spreading outbreak. While cases are dropping in Monrovia, the virus has found its way into remote villages in eastern Liberia, where the fight has become a door to door battle against an invisible enemy. By day, Mabel picks up suspected Ebola cases; by night she returns to her regular job as a nurse.

During one of her searches for Ebola victims, she comes across three people emerging from the bush–Tawoo, his aunt Ponawenee, and his mother Gbelawoh. There is fear in their eyes because they know that Ebola is a numbers game. As much as Tawoo will pray, as much as Ponawenee will fight, Ebola will greedily claim every life.

The anger of the people of Taylor’s Town is pointed at one person who they say is responsible for introducing the virus: Stanley. Stanley brought his sick son back to the village – a fateful decision that wiped out his entire family and eventually cost 14 lives.

These characters are interconnected through their relationships, their attachment to the rural Bong County of Liberia, and their experiences in fighting Ebola. Filmmaker Carl Gierstorfer follows them through their journeys, exploring the human toll of the deadly disease.

(Produced by DOCDAYS Productions in co-production with Al Jazeera America and SWR in collaboration with ARTE. Produced with support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Sales: PBS International)

 

• Hazardous Work: Diving into the Philippines' Dangerous Underwater Mines | Produced by Larry Price

Filipino divers disappear into water as opaque as chocolate milk as they blindly dig in search of gold trapped in muddy sediment. It's risky business: As a miner goes deeper, he risks a horrific death: underwater tunnels can collapse; the compressor that provides air can fail. Many consider this form of underwater gold mining as the world’s most dangerous job.

Multimedia journalist Larry C. Price began working on child labor in the gold fields of the Philippines in 2012. During a 2013 trip, he traveled to the Camarines Norte region of Luzon, the largest Philippine island. Price encountered this peculiar type of underwater mining in regions where the water table is only inches below the surface. Miners dig pits that are only one meter in diameter and which quickly fill with water. To mine the gold-rich clay, they descend into the water and breathe through thin plastic tubes attached to small compressors. The pits are up to 40-feet deep. Workers wedge themselves at the bottom and work in complete darkness to fill sacks with muddy ore. Often, unstable pits collapse. Almost always in these cases, the accidents are fatal.

As one compressor miner told Price, “You don’t want to go down there. If the sides collapse, we have no choice but to leave you.”

(Produced by Larry C. Price in collaboration with PBS NewsHour, won a 2015 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast.)