Where the Sweet Birds Sang

By documentary filmmaker Sarah Teale

A few years ago, my husband, Gordon Chaplin, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I then found that in the valley near to our farm in upstate New York, thirty-six farmers and their neighbors had Parkinson’s. 

I contacted Ray Dorsey, a renowned neurologist and the author of Ending Parkinson’s and The Parkinson’s Plan, and he met with the community and explained that only 10% of Parkinson’s diagnoses are genetic - 90% are caused by the environment and a major culprit in is the use of pesticides, in particular paraquat. All of the farmers had used paraquat to kill weeds.

I am a British documentary filmmaker living in New York and I filmed that meeting and started filming with my farm neighbors. I also traveled to Huddersfield in the UK where paraquat is made by a company called Syngenta. Syngenta is owned by the Chinese government but paraquat is so toxic that it is banned in China. Paraquat is also banned in the UK but shipped to the United States. It is banned in over 70 countries around the world but paraquat use has doubled in the United States in the last five years, despite thousands of studies that have linked paraquat to Parkinson’s.

Investigative journalist Carey Gillam had anonymously received boxes of internal memos, emails and studies from Syngenta and these boxes revealed that in fact the company has known that paraquat causes Parkinson’s since the ‘60s.

I have now been filming for over a year in both the United States and in the UK, where farmers in Yorkshire have very similar stories. We cannot cure Parkinson’s unless we investigate the causes behind this debilitating disease and the tactics of the chemical industry to repress this knowledge. I hope that my film, and Movers and Shakers, will advance that understanding.

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