Synopsis
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017) is an HBO drama you can watch online on iFILM, adapted from Rebecca Skloot's bestselling book about the woman behind the HeLa cells.
It was 1951 when doctors took a sample of a young Black woman's tumor without ever asking her. What those cells did, no human tissue had managed before: they kept dividing, with no off switch. Labeled HeLa, they went on to fuel the polio vaccine, cancer research and experiments flown into orbit. Henrietta herself never found out. Decades later, the film trails her daughter Deborah as she tries to grasp what part of her mother still lives in vials around the globe.
Oprah Winfrey plays Deborah — jittery, guarded, worn thin by the search for answers — across from Rose Byrne as journalist Rebecca Skloot. Director George C. Wolfe keeps his lens on the family rather than the lab bench, on people who lost a piece of someone and were never thanked for it. A reckoning with consent, race and the bill that progress quietly runs up. Stream The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks online on iFILM.
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