Hope springs eternal in Berlin

IT was in the middle of last year, when cancer survivor Edgar Tang first heard about The Berlin Patient. The 38-year-old was driving home one night while listening to the BBC World Service radio station, when a short blurb came on about a man in Berlin who had been cured of HIV.

"It made me wonder if I had just heard a fictional story. He almost seemed like a mythical creature of sorts. So I called my old friend (Dzul Sungit) who lives in Rotterdam, and I said I'm coming to Berlin. I don't know why, I just want to find out more about The Berlin Patient," says Tang, a trained filmmaker who is currently a producer at HBO Asia.

So a few months later, he hopped on a plane to Berlin, and began a journey that would eventually result in his upcoming documentary, I Hugged The Berlin Patient.

The film premieres next Monday at The Grand Cathay, and standard tickets are priced at $30, while VIP tickets are $100. All net proceeds will be donated to Action for AIDS.

The Berlin Patient refers to Timothy Ray Brown, who was cured of HIV in Berlin in 2007. The bone marrow transplants that were meant to treat his acute myeloid leukaemia ended up getting rid of his HIV as well.

Up till 2010, no one even knew his name, because Brown was an extremely private person, says Tang. So when they first got to Berlin, they didn't do it with the intention of putting together a documentary at all.

"My co-director, Dzul, said he was just going to roll the camera, and if I was not interesting, he would stop rolling. But he never did," says Tang, who is currently in his sixth year of remission from Hodgkin's lymphoma - cancer of the lymph nodes.

"When we arrived in Berlin, we didn't know people, we didn't know the language, we basically funded it ourselves. It was really a leap of faith of some kind... But we realised that, at worst, nothing would happen and we would have a holiday," he adds.

And during that first week, things did not go very smoothly. Tang spent most of his time walking around the city wearing a placard with the German words "Wissen sie, wer The Berlin Patient ist" or "Do you know who The Berlin Patient is?", and he grew increasingly frustrated when no one seemed to have heard of this elusive man.

"But one day something happened, and it all kind of fell into place suddenly. I remember it was on a day that was quite auspicious, the 10th of October, so like a perfect 10," he laughs.

"Certain things happened. Whoever we wanted to get in touch with somehow got back to us, so we realised we couldn't stop rolling."

Though Tang refuses to reveal too many details about the rest of his journey, the title of the film already gives away the ending - that he did get to meet the man in the end, after a few months of searching, a lot of faith, and help from kind strangers in a foreign land.

I Hugged The Berlin Patient may sound like a potentially preachy, video-version of a motivational speech, but Tang insists that the last thing he wants is for his audience to spend the hour and a half in tears. Instead, he hopes the film will come across as quirky and light-hearted.

"It's not disease-specific. It's just about hope. It's just watching something uplifting. It's not as heavy as some people think because it's set against the backdrop of a medical, HIV or cancer thing. It's not heavy at all. And it's in that sense very Singaporean and global in its theme," says Tang.

rachloi@sph.com.sg

The world charity premiere of I Hugged The Berlin Patient runs on Dec 2 at 8.30pm at The Grand Cathay. Tickets cost $30, and VIP tickets cost $100. I Hugged The Berlin Patient opens to public on Dec 5. Log on to www.berlinpatientfilm.com/ for more information