The Human Trial (2022)
Director: Guy Mossman, Lisa Hepner Run Time: 91 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2022
Country: United States
Language: English
Presented at the Film Center and in our Virtual Screening Room
About the film:
In 2011, Lisa Hepner and her husband Guy Mossman heard about a radical stem cell treatment for diabetes, a disease that shockingly kills over five million people each year. Driven by a desire to cure Lisa of her own type 1 diabetes (T1D), the filmmakers got unprecedented access to a clinical trial – only the sixth ever stem cell trial in the world.
What follows is an intimate decade-long journey with the patients and scientists who risk everything for everybody else. This film peels back the headlines to show the sweat, passion, and sacrifice behind every breakthrough cure. For the millions of patients suffering around the world, these breakthroughs can’t come fast enough.
“When diabetes is finally defeated, this film will be an important contribution to our understanding… [and] a tribute to the scientists, doctors and volunteers who are doing their bit to get us there”
—Jennie Kermode for An Eye for Film
About the filmmakers:
For seven years, filmmakers Lisa Hepner and Guy Mossman embedded themselves with a biotech company in San Diego. They filmed the researchers’ triumphs and failures in the lab, following them from Tokyo to Riyadh as they raised money to keep their trial going. At the same time, the husband/wife team followed two patients, the self-described “guinea pigs” at the University of Minnesota. Combining these two points of view, the filmmakers reveal the emotional and physical rollercoaster that scientists and patients go through as they travel along the road to a cure for disease.
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