Conversations with vaccine-critical parents

The film is a poetic documentary, based on interviews with vaccine-critical parents and their home videos in the Netherlands and Finland. It explores the health beliefs and concepts backgrounding the parents’ vaccine criticism, such as their understanding of the immune system and the importance of illness in a child’s development, as well as their definitions of “natural”. The parents’ perceptions of health have been interpreted in arts-based diagrams and discussed with a vaccine researcher. This work is part of the Academy Research Fellow project of Kaisu Koski, funded by the Academy of Finland, developing arts-based cinematic representations of the patient and the doctor in medical education. The film has been a pilot-tested in medical education at the University of Tampere in August 2016.