Irene Taylor Brodsky

[March 18th, 2009]

The Indian market scenes that run during the end credits of Irene Taylor Brodsky’s The Final Inch include a memorable shot of a hunk of watermelon. It is richly, delectably red—and buzzing with flies. Brodsky, a Portland documentarian, doesn’t flinch from portraying the sewage and grime that makes India one of the last hot spots for polio. Her 38-minute film tracks the pains of public health workers who travel shack-to-shack to shame and cajole parents into permitting their children to receive the two free drops of oral vaccine that would immunize them against the crippling disease. The Final Inch earned Brodsky an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject, and makes its Portland debut Friday at the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival—a.k.a. POW Fest. WW spoke to her Monday.

WW: How did polio catch your interest?

Irene Taylor Brodsky: Actually, the film started when a guy named Dr. Larry Brilliant—and that is really his name—who was the head of the philanthropic arm of Google, approached me and asked me what I thought about polio. And I told him, “Well, I don’t really think about polio, to be honest with you.” And he said, “What would you think about making a film about these public health workers all over the world who are working to eradicate this disease?” I looked into it and I definitely found that there was just this whole world of public health, and particularly this whole army of people, like millions of people, who work on this.

Unlike other films that have been made about India recently—Slumdog Millionaire being an obvious example—you emphasize that the squalor isn’t pretty. Is that something you were intending?

Well, you know, it’s funny because I actually joked with Jeff, the DP, I said he could make a pile of shit look beautiful, because he just does such a good job with the camera. But the thing is, filth and lack of sanitation is the culprit of this virus. So we had to show squalor. We had to show filth. And we had to show it in its reality. That it’s ugly and that it’s everywhere, and that’s why these kids get sick—because there’s this problem in India: They don’t have the infrastructure in their poorest communities to deal with this. They don’t have proper sewage, they don’t have proper garbage collection, they don’t have clean water. I think in some ways our film was the real Slumdog, in terms of showing India. We didn’t show a fictitious slum. We actually take you into [an] urban slum. I certainly don’t say that at the expense of [Slumdog], but just that I think that there is a certain romanticization that can go on when you are looking at the slums of India, and I don’t think there’s really much to be romanticized about them at all in my film.

Who’s the nicest person you met at the Oscars?

I would say, this year, the nicest person was Frank Langella. I shouldn’t say this year. The only year. I met him at the [nominees’] luncheon and again at the Oscars, and he is just an incredibly gracious, venerable person who’s incredibly talented.