Dope is Death

SYNOPSIS

The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 – a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist.

Mia Donovan is a filmmaker based in Montreal. She has written and directed three feature documentaries, INSIDE LARA ROXX (2011), DEPROGRAMMED (2015) and DOPE IS DEATH (2020). She was the recipient of the prestigious Don Haig Award for outstanding achievement as an emerging filmmaker in 2012. Her films have been presented worldwide at film festivals, on TV broadcasts, theatrically and on digital platforms such as Netflix. In 2016 she wrote and directed her first virtual reality experience called Deprogrammed VR (2016) which won the coveted IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling that year. Aside from working on her own projects, her research of the cult experience for DEPROGRAMMED helped land her a consultation gig on Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5. She is developing her first narrative feature called THE TOUCH OF HER FLESH.