Mia Donovan| CANADA
78 min | Feature
In partnership with Guelph Black Heritage Society
For over 50 years, alternative medicine practitioners have advocated the use of acupuncture as part of treatment for drug addiction. However, few people know that this practice evolved in large part thanks to the Black Panthers, radical liberation politics and Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s stepfather. Radical politics meet community health when Dr. Mutulu Shakuralong with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973. Having viewed heroin and methadone rehab as "chemical warfare" on the poor, they build a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist in America.
MIA DONOVAN—Director Mia Donovan is a filmmaker based in Montreal. She has written and directed three feature documentaries, Inside Lara Roxx (2011), Deprogrammed (2015) and Dope is Death (2020). She was the recipient of the prestigious Don Haig Award for outstanding achievement as an emerging filmmaker in 2012. Her films have been presented worldwide at film festivals, on TV broadcasts, theatrically and on digital platforms such as Netflix. In 2016 she wrote and directed her first virtual reality experience called Deprogrammed VR (2016) which won the coveted IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling that year. She is currently developing her first narrative feature called The Touch of Her Flesh.