Writer/ director Luke Morgan and Ken Gibson, CEO of The Mission to End Leprosy, told David Hennessy about their Oscar- qualified short film, The Boat
Luke Morgan and his brother Jake, who founded the company Morgan Brothers, believe film can change the world.
That is exactly what they are aiming to do with a short film that they hope plays a role in eradicating the disease of leprosy.
Luke Morgan wrote and directed the short film, The Boat. His brother Jake helped with the producing and the soundtrack.
Made in Nepal, The Boat is the story of Dhuckia and her father Raoul.
The pair are close as father and daughter but life changes in an instant when Raoul realises Dhuckia has lost some sensation in her feet: An early symptom of leprosy. He takes her to a leprosy hospital, leaving her outside on the steps as she sleeps.
Before the credits roll, it is revealed that the story is true and Dhuckia’s father never returned for her.
What is also true is that the disease can be cured but many families can’t access it.
However, the stigma of having the ‘curse’ of leprosy as it is referred to in some parts of the world still means being cast out of a community, meaning that Raoul had very little choice or felt like he had when he realised what Dhuckia’s symptom meant.
Produced and shot on location in Nepal with the Mission To End Leprosy, the film aims to raise awareness about the crushing threat leprosy still carries in rural communities throughout the world.
The Boat has qualified to be considered for the 97th Academy Awards after winning the qualifying awards at the Foyle Film Festival and Cork Film Festival.
The Irish World chatted to writer/ director Luke Morgan, from Galway, and Ken Gibson, CEO of The Mission to End Leprosy, from Dublin.
Ken Gibson told The Irish World: “I met the real Dhuckia.
“I just happened to be telling Luke the story of Dhuckia because it’s a story that’s lived with me ever since.
“In fact, it’s the story that has kept me working in the anti-leprosy field ever since.
“It was my first visit to leprosy work overseas and Dhukia was the first young girl I met with leprosy at this particular hospital.
“What had happened was her feet had been damaged by leprosy and her dad brought her to the leprosy hospital and left her there, promised he would come back for her the next week, and never came back.
“By the time I met her, she had been there for a number of years.
“She was about 12 or 13 when I met her.
“I stood there thinking, ‘How can a dad ever do that to his daughter?’
“But I’m a Westerner, I have choices.
“Dhuckia has three sisters back at home. She lives in a community where, even today, in those kind of communities, the whole family could be banished because of having a curable illness.
“It’s just the stigma and the superstition and the fear that goes around it.
“So having met Dhuckia, having thought about her dad and the lack of choice that he had, it’s something that’s motivated me ever since.
“I determined there and then that I would do whatever I could to make sure the day comes when no dad has to make that choice ever again.”
Luke Morgan told The Irish World: “Myself and my brother were doing some contract work for The Mission to End Leprosy.
“Ken told us about this heartbreaking true story about a girl called Dhuckia and I was very moved by the story, so a couple of days later decided to put pen to paper and wrote an adaptation of the story in screenwriting form.
“I sent it to Ken, not really with any expectations and he got back and promptly said, ‘Let’s try and make this happen’.
“Then COVID got in the way of our plans, but we were eventually able to basically get a small number of Irish filmmakers over to Nepal to team up with a small number of Nepali filmmakers.
“That’s basically how The Boat came to be.”
I learned only when watching the film that leprosy still affects communities in this way and also that it can be cured so easily however it is about getting that cure to those who need it..
Ken: “That is the challenge.
“The cure was discovered in Ireland back in the 80s.
“It has been used to cure about 20 million people ever since.
“It is available.
“We just need to get it to the places where people like Dhuckia live.
“You’ll see from the cinematography what a stunningly beautiful part of the world it is and yet lurking behind are some of the issues like leprosy, that just defy belief in so many ways.”
It is a disease of poverty, isn’t it?
Ken: “You’re fundamentally right in saying it’s a disease of poverty.
“It’s primarily in poor places, hard to reach places where there’s lack of sanitation, poor nutrition and so on, but it used to be in every part of the world.
“You look anywhere across Ireland or the UK, you’ll find historical leprosy sites, and it’s because we got better nutrition and better sanitation that diseases like that beat a retreat.
“It’s not a respecter of wealth but primarily it’s because of lack of sanitation, lack of nutrition and lack of access to medical care, that is the issue.
“One of the things we’re trying to do at the moment is look at a campaign to eradicate leprosy from the world by providing the care that isn’t currently available.
“That, again, is what has moved the Morgan brothers to actually engage in pulling this movie together for us and with us.”
The film is very moving. I could see how it broke the father’s heart to do what he did…
Luke: “Jake and I, as filmmakers, fundamentally believe that film can change the world.
“The reason why we feel film can change the world is because it’s a medium that is steeped in emotion and appeals to the heart rather than the head.
“Rather than a piece of promotional material or a documentary, and not to discredit those mediums either, we felt that the best vehicle for it was a piece of narrative cinema because it invites the audience to take the place of the father and take the place of Dhuckia herself and in doing so, appeal to the heart rather than the head.
“It’s the heart that moves people to action and the head helps.
“But primarily, predominantly, in our opinion, these things are motivated by the heart and that is why it’s to the credit of The Mission to End Leprosy and their decision that they took a chance on allowing us to put our money where our mouth was with that ethos.”
Is money the problem with getting the cure to those who need it or is it also an education and awareness thing?
Ken: “The eradication process, the programme that we have in mind is a really straightforward thing.
“On some levels, yes. It’s about money. It’s about raising a lot of money on a global basis. But the money is raiseable.
“The multi millions we need is raiseable if we can manage to gather the data to prove the extent of the issue, and that’s what the eradication programme is about.
“Over the next five year period, we need to raise €3 million to put out a pilot project.
“We need to gather the data in certain locations to prove the incidence of leprosy, and treat the leprosy.
“We’ve a pilot project in India at the moment.
“It’s been running six months.
“We’ve been successful so far.
“What we’re seeing is that the numbers of new cases being detected is rising because we’re actively searching for them.
“We treat those cases.
“Then somebody’s not infectious.
“By year three, we should have zero cases. If we continue that for years four and five, we’ll have proven that we can eradicate leprosy from that community. That’s what we need to raise money for at the moment, to prove that the disease can be eradicated.
“Once we have that data, it becomes easier to get one of the really big philanthropic agencies to provide the finance for that on a roll out basis.
“The Boat is a significant tool in raising the awareness so that people understand that eradication is possible.”
A lot of this story rests on Tejuswee Ram Dahal, the young actress who plays Dhuckia, doesn’t it?
Luke: “Yes, we had an extensive casting process and they came back with a real life father/ daughter combo in Shree Ram Dahal and Tejuswee Ram Dahal.
“They were utterly fantastic to work with and quite astonishing the level of artistry, in particular Tejuswee who at the time of filming was eight to nine years old, that she was capable of bringing to the project.
“The primary instruments of any film are its actors and they’re the portal through which we can access the emotional heft of the story and we couldn’t have gotten a better pair, in my opinion, than the pair we got.”
Ken: “Where people have seen this, the reaction is incredible because people are genuinely moved by this.
“Jake has done an incredible job with the music because he brings you into the heart of Nepal without losing the essence of the story.
“I have seen people who have known Dhuckia’s story for 20 years and been moved to tears by seeing it on the big screen because it enlivens it. I could never tell the story the way that the Morgan brothers have actually brought it to life.
“We need to take that to a wider audience so people understand the issue and they become motivated to do something about this as well.
“It’s the oldest known disease.
“We need people to understand how terrible it is.
“We need people to understand that it still exists and we need people to be moved to say, ‘I want to play my part in eradicating this disease’, which is what we’re about.
“That’s why we’re called The Mission to End Leprosy.
“We have an ambitious plan to eradicate the disease in 15 years, and we need people to be moved to that call to action.
“That’s the reaction we’re looking for.”
Luke: “I suppose the benchmark against which to measure the success of any film is a total stranger who owes you nothing and who has never met you, sitting in a dark room, watching something and being moved.
“That has happened with every single time that we’ve shown the film.
“Everybody in the room has been moved.
“Complete strangers to us have seen the film and have been moved.
“I think that is the real benchmark of success with the film.”
Is anything known about Dhuckia’s life afterwards or even if she was one day reunited with her family?
Ken: “I don’t know the answer to that question and that is part of the nature of the way those hospitals in that part of the world have to work, because you have got to protect the privacy of the patient.
“Let me tell you another story that will illustrate that.
“I am acutely aware of a lady who lives in Nepal.
“When she was a tiny girl, she was in a different hospital.
“She heard cameras clicking, a commotion. She came into the room and there was Diana, Princess of Wales who reached out and shook her hand.
“And that girl grew up, got married, had a family.
“On the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, I sent somebody to ask would she make a statement about what it was like to meet the princess?
“She told our colleagues where to go, what to do with themselves because she has never told her husband, she has never told anybody.
“Even to this day, she cannot tell anybody she met the princess because if she says she met the princess, she’ll have to say she met her in a leprosy hospital.
“Even though she’s married and has kids and is cured and has no disability, she could still be driven from her community.”
As well as the film works and is self- contained, I wondered are there any plans to follow it and tell more? I was imagining the father returning home to his family and their grief because Dhuckia had a loving family..
Luke: “I think the power of the film is in its simplicity and its self- contained narrative.
“It attempts to answer a single open ended question which is, why? Why does this still happen in our world today? Because the film is set during relatively modern times and anybody we’ve spoken to about the film don’t know that leprosy is still an issue in many parts of the world.
“It’s for that reason that this film exists.
“I think to make a longer version of the film would possibly do the issue at the heart of the film a disservice because really, the essence of this exercise is to raise awareness for leprosy and also, I think, strike a note in people’s heart in order to learn more about the disease, what they can do to help combat it so that, as Ken says, no father ever has to make that choice again.”
Ken: “The beauty of what the Morgan brothers have created here is it stops at the point of our knowledge.
“It tells the story as we know it.
“We know nothing about the dad after that point in time.
“I lie awake and think, ‘What did he tell the mum when he that went home? or did he go home? Could he bring himself to go home?’
“I often lie awake wondering, ‘What does Dhuckia think about her dad?
“We don’t know those things so to create a greater feature length would be to impose answers on those questions that we don’t know.
“The beauty of the short, as it is, is it deals with the knowledge we have, but it raises the questions to which we have no answer.
“That’s the power of a good movie, that it raises questions and forces you to think through, ‘How would I react in that situation? Would I go home? Would I tell her mother? Would I be brave enough to go home?’
“It raises the question if you’re Dhuckia, ‘Could you forgive your dad? Would you understand?’ All those kind of question, the boat has left those in the air at the point of knowledge that we have but it forces us to think it through from a human perspective and say, ‘What would I do in that situation?’
“I think that’s powerful.”
Although shot in Nepal, the film and the story has its Irish roots.
“There was a significant Nepali contribution made to the making of the film.
“There was an equal number of Nepali people involved in the making the film as there were Irish people, although it predominantly was an Irish production.
“It was a very enjoyable shoot because of the symbiotic creative relationship that everybody shared on the crew.
“It sounds kind of highfalutin and very ‘notions’ but we joked that we didn’t share a language but we shared the common language of filmmaking.
“But it is true, because even though we were teaming up with people from the other side of the world, everybody was united and focused on the same goal.
“The question that some people have asked in the past is, ‘Why get involved in this issue on the other side of the world?’ And that’s why, because it makes sense for us historically to do so.”
Ken: “The Mission to end Leprosy is one of the oldest anti-leprosy agencies in the world, founded in Ireland.
“In fact, a lot of the anti-leprosy work around the world has been spawned from our organisation.
“It has been a global leader since its foundation 150 years ago so in that sense, it’s a very Irish story.
“As Luke has rightly pointed out, the cure for leprosy was discovered in Trinity College Dublin back in the 80s and has been used globally.
“The moment now is to eradicate the disease.
“So while the anti-leprosy work started with this really old organisation, we’re focused on finishing it from Ireland as well.”
For more information about The Mission to End Leprosy, click here.
