Yellow Fever and the Remaking of the City
20 December 2011 | Share:
After three months of research, expert interviews, and script development, and four days of reenactment, “Yellow Fever and the Remaking of the City” has moved into post-production. Broadcast in Philadelphia will be on 6ABC in March.
One of the challenges in making the film—only 26 minutes long to fit the TV format—was to keep the focus on the city as a character, and to try to understand how that character shaped the city’s response and was ultimately shaped by it. The epidemic, which killed 10 percent of residents of the US capital, ushered in an ambitious period of infrastructure development meant to improve urban public health, The story is equally about the freedom struggle; Yellow Fever arrives in the US in the wake of the Haitian slave revolt; it finds black Philadelphians in mid-agitation themselves, attempting to find a place as citizens in the republic of the free.
The film still above is of Dr. Benjamin Rush bleeding a patient.