In 1992, the Ugandan government sequestered a portion of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forrest as a national park and world heritage site in order to protect the endangered mountain gorillas occupying that area. Unfortunately, this delineation entailed expelling the region’s human inhabitants, the Batwa pygmies, who had called the forest home for over 4,000 years. Eight years later, a “fact-finding” expedition financed by the Episcopalian Church traveled across the Atlantic to investigate the status of this group of ousted aboriginals. Their findings were alarmingly bleak. Since their expulsion from the forest, the pygmy infant mortality rate had risen to 18%, and the rate of mortality for children under the age of five grew to a dizzying 38%. These grave statistics, coupled with a below-average fertility rate, indicated with a high degree of certainty that the Batwa pygmies were teetering on the brink of annihilation.

The fact that the pygmies are not extinct today is owed largely to the efforts of Scott Kellermann, a California doctor who attended that fact-finding expedition back in 2000. Moved to action by his own sense of compassion and his appreciation of the unique and ancient culture of this small group of people, Kellermann left his life in California to open a free clinic and school in Uganda to treat the pygmies. In the five years since the Kellermann Compound’s inception, it has successfully treated thousands of pygmy patients, and has been visited by hundreds of volunteers, mostly white American medical students. Our film follows one of these students, David Grew, as he embarks on his journey to assist in Dr. Kellermann’s free clinic.