Hollywood producers to make film about HIV medics

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ENTERTAINMENT / Movies

Hollywood producers to make film about HIV medics

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-08-06 22:10

SOFIA?- Hollywood filmmakers hope to bring to the big screen the
eight-year ordeal of six foreign medics convicted of deliberately
injecting 460 Libyan children with the HIV virus.

Sixth Sense Productions Inc, which helped raise funding for
Oscar-nominated genocide drama "Hotel Rwanda," said the five Bulgarian
nurses and a Palestinian doctor had signed over their life rights for the
film project "The Benghazi Six."

The medics, who were sentenced to death, were freed on July 24 after the
European Union brokered a cooperation deal with Libya following years of
complex legal and political battles.

The medical workers have always maintained their innocence and said they
were tortured into confessing to intentionally starting an epidemic in
which hundreds of children were infected with the virus that causes AIDS
while working in Libya's second biggest city of Benghazi in 1998.

"The story of 'The Benghazi Six' is ... inspirational having the six
medics survive what they survived in prison throughout the years and
lived to see their freedom," said Sam Feuer, president of development and
production at Sixth Sense.

"The world needs to learn about this injustice. It's not just a Bulgarian
story, its a human story that the world will relate to and learn from,"
he told Reuters by email on Sunday.

The EU, which Bulgaria joined in January, and the United Sates had pushed
for the medic's release, pointing to evidence of torture and studies
showing the epidemic started before the nurses arrived at the Benghazi's
children hospital.

Although focused on the medics, the film will also show the tragedy of
the children infected with the virus, Feuer said. More than 50 of the
children have died.

Sixth Sense is in talks with Ann Peacock, who wrote the screenplay
adaptation of the children's fantasy blockbuster "The Chronicles of
Narnia," to write the script for the medics film, Feuer said. The company
is also interviewing directors.

"Hollywood stars will star in it. Our job is to develop the best script
possible that will attract them," said Feuer.

Sixth Sense producers will come to Sofia to meet the medics and their
families once the company lines up a screenwriter.

The medics said they were glad their ordeal might be shown one day on the
big screen.

"The world will see the truth. The world must see the truth. Such a case
doesn't happen every day," said Dr Zdravko Georgiev, husband of one of
the nurses. He was acquitted in the HIV case in 2004, but not allowed to
leave the country until last month.

The Bulgarian nurses and Georgiev left the relatively poor Balkan country
in the late 1990s to work in Libya where medical workers' salaries were
higher. Nineteen Bulgarian medics were detained in early 1999 and 13 were
later released.

Western scientists have said Libya's inefficient health-care system was
the real culprit for the HIV infection.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov pardoned the nurses and the
Palestinian doctor, who recently took Bulgarian citizenship, after they
arrived in Sofia two weeks ago.

The medics return to Bulgaria closed what Libya's critics called a human
rights scandal and advanced the long-isolated north African country's
efforts to normalize ties with the West.

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