Directors/Producers: Elizabeth Horn, Steve
Michelson
Description: In
Our Own Hands: How Patients Are Reinventing Medicine opens
with an urgent question posed by desperate patients and their
families: can new technologies help us treat and prevent the most
alarming and perhaps understated health threat that we face? Chronic
diseases now affect over 130 million Americans and cost countless
billions of healthcare dollars. Through the stories of the
impassioned, often defiant struggles of the film’s three central
characters—all with complex, unresolved medical issues— we
explore the emergence of “participatory medicine”, enabled by a
host of groundbreaking technologies that put more data about our own
biological, behavioral and environmental ecosystems into our hands
than ever before possible.
Biography: Elizabeth Horn is
a storyteller devoted to illuminating possibilities in difficult
situations. Using documentary as a lens to reveal complex subjects,
Horn creates compelling examinations of the choices we make when
there seem to be no choices left. Her uplifting, inspiring, sometimes
controversial tales of families in crisis evoke passionate responses
from viewers— shifting perspectives, driving empathy, and bringing
desperate situations to light. Horn has 30 years of filmmaking
experience beginning with vision films for Silicon Valley
corporations, with a pivot to documentary and narrative film when her
daughter was diagnosed with autism.
Steve
Michelson is the
Executive Producer at Lobitos Creek Ranch. Steve has functioned as
the Executive Producer on many award-winning documentary films
including Climb Against
the Odds, Oil on Ice, Crude Impact, Burning
the Future, River
of Renewal, Power
Paths and Scarred
Lands and Wounded
Lives. Steve and
partner Craig Malina founded Specialty Studios LLC to focus on the
distribution of films about the environment, social justice and
sustainability. Shortly after that, the company acquired The Video
Project, a distributor of films to the educational market. The
company represents about 320 films through its catalog and website
and the streaming platform, called the MediaHub. Steve was Co-founder
and President of One Pass, San Francisco's largest production and
post-production studio. He is a recipient of the Gilbert Award for
outstanding contribution to Northern California's film community. He
has served four terms as a Governor with the National Academy for
Television Arts and Sciences.
