Introduction

Science and medicine have been highly significant subjects for film-makers. Scientific documentaries and films have helped to educate the general population about public health, and spread messages about advances in modern medicine during the 20th century [1].

In the 2000s, the centrality of scientific knowledge was increasingly being contested in debates around policy responses to global warming and claims of human complicity in the phenomenon. The relationship between science and the public was seen to be at a critical juncture [2]. A feature of this contestation in political debates and the news media was a limited understanding of the nature of science and of scientific discourse amongst the general public. However, it was believed that for science to retain democratic support, rectifying a deficit in public scientific knowledge would not suffice: engagement and dialogue between science and non-scientists’ was essential [1].

Thus, in the 2010s there was a renaissance of interest in films about science and health with various initiatives focused on ‘medical’, ‘global health’ and ‘public health’ films being launched [3]. During this time, the authors also launched their own not-for-profit organization, the Public Health Film Society (PHFS) that sought to ‘bring together people from many different backgrounds, to encourage them to share their knowledge, skills, and experience, and be inspired through the medium of film to understand public health, and work’.

Since these initiatives have launched the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic saw a significant change in public awareness of science and a renewed focus on the relationship between science and the public [4, 5]. Throughout this period, the PHFS has been running the International Public Health Film Competition (IPHFC) from 2016 until 2024. This film competition has acted as an international showcase for health-related films over this crucial period in the history of public health.

The aim of this manuscript is to describe the films submitted to the five editions of the IPHFC, namely two editions prior to the pandemic (2016, 2018), two within the pandemic (2020, 2022) and one following the end of the pandemic (2024) to understand the breadth of films submitted during this time, the topics covered and the reception of these films in terms of scores attained in the competition.

Methods

The IPHFC has been described in a previous publication [3] and has been conducted bi-annually since 2016. The competition is open to film-makers from around the world, with each edition having a theme to encourage submissions on contemporary health issues. Call for submissions to each edition of the competition was open for 6 months and advertised through a number of channels including the PHFS website and social media platforms whose followers include practitioners, students and film-makers. We also emailed over 150 film schools globally to encourage submissions from students of film and placed advertisements on film festival platforms including Withoutabox.com, FIlmFreeway.com and Reelport.com in order to appeal to established film-makers.

To encourage the widest participation in the competition, it has been free for film-makers to enter submission and all submissions were reviewed regardless of whether they covered issues related to the theme of the competition. Submissions were received and viewed through an online platform which allowed the competition to continue virtually despite the lockdowns experienced worldwide during the pandemic [6]. Film-makers were encouraged to submit further written information with their films to describe the motivations and background to the production, the subsequent distribution and any evidence of evaluation of the film’s impact.

Judging and scoring of submitted films was undertaken by an independent film selection committee of made up of film and public health experts who gave their time for free to view the films and decide on the competition award winners. Judges were asked to score the submitted films according to 10 equally weighted criteria see (Table 1) for a total score out of 100. Judging was undertaken in two rounds, with the full committee meeting for the second round of judging to consider the relative merits of the shortlisted films and select a competition winner.

Information on submitted films including film title, duration of the film, country of the submitter, judges’ comments and scores was saved in a database held by the PHFS. All personal identifiers were removed and a dataset was made available for this study.

The mean film duration in minutes was calculated for each edition of the IPHFC along with the mean, median, mode and range of scores in each judging criteria for each edition. No qualitative analysis was undertaken of judges’ comments.

Results

In total, over five editions of the IPHFC 5,368 films were submitted to the competition. (Table 2) showed that the number of films submitted to the IPHFC increased over time, peaking in 2020 with the 1,746 films submitted from 112 countries at the start of the pandemic. The mean duration of films submitted decreased over time with the mean length decreasing from 27.4 minutes to 14.3 minutes during the 3^rd edition in 2020 before increasing again to 19.7 minutes by the 5^th edition in 2024.

The total mean judging scores also decreased over time with mean total scores of 36.3 out of 100 (range 63) in 2016 to 23.2 out of 100 (range 77) during the 3^rd edition in 2020 before increasing again to 27.5 out of 100 (range 79) by the 5^th edition in 2024. Notably, the decrease scores during the 3^rd edition in 2020 appear to result from decreases in scores across criteria related to the film ‘Plot and structure’, ‘Pacing’, and ‘Character/ storyline’.

Combined with information on the reduced mean duration of films submitted during 2020, this would suggest that the increased number of films submitted to this edition of the IPHFC were drafted in response to the pandemic and film-makers had not had time to fully develop their scripts. Across all editions the scores under the criteria of ‘Use and evaluation of impact’ were very low, barely reaching an average of 1 out of 10 in any of the editions, suggesting that there is little evidence that the majority of films submitted to the IPHFC had been creatively integrated into other public health programs on this issue, or made use of evaluation to see how the film would change public health practice.

Interestingly, the average scores under the criteria of ‘Public health importance’ halved over the five editions from 3.4 out of 10 to 1.7 out of 10. However, the range of scores under these criteria remained high, suggesting that the average scores under these criteria may have been diluted by the higher number of film submissions over time, many of which may not have addressed issues of public health importance (Table 3).

Discussion

As far as the authors are aware, ours is the first study to review films submitted to a health-related film competition that spans a crucial period in the history of public health. We shed light on the films that were submitted during this time and the reaction to those films in the terms of judges' scores across 10 criteria.

Our main findings are that the number of health films submitted to the IPHFC increased over time despite the onset of the pandemic, which had disrupted film production worldwide [7]. In fact, the number of films submitted was highest during the pandemic, although the average duration and overall quality of the films submitted was lower, especially as a result of lower scores relating to the ‘Plot and structure’, ‘Pacing’, and ‘Character/ storyline’ of the films.

Finally, our findings show that there was little evidence for the constructive use of health films to effect public health change or the evaluation of impact from health films submitted to the IPHFC. Thus, whilst there are many film-makers producing film related to health issues, few have been creatively integrated into other public health programs, or made use of evaluation to see how the film would change public health practice. This is a missed opportunity for film-makers and the public health community to collaborate.

Public interest in science in the UK and other countries is currently high and since the end of the pandemic studies have found that trust in science and scientific evidence has increased overall, but that public attitudes have also become more polarized [5, 8, 9]. Film-makers are becoming increasingly important in raising public awareness of science and engendering trust in scientific evidence, including evidence related to health issues. Our research confirms that there has been a substantial and growing interest in health-related films over the last decade and there is an untapped potential for the public health community and film-makers to collaborate on the use of these films and their evaluation against public health priorities (Table 4).

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge all the film-makers who put forward their films to the competition over the past decade and the judges who reviewed the submissions including Pamela Luna, Helen Donovan Patrick Russell, Catherine McCarthy, Drs Olena Seminog, Stella Botchway, Bergonzi-King , Angela Baker, Emily Clark, Kartik Sharma, Samantha Field, Lynn Zheng , Alison Kahn, Nimish Kapoor, Professors John Ashton, Paul Inman, Stephanie Johnson, Maggie Rae, John Middleton, Kevin Fenton.

References

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