After taking aim at the pharmaceutical industry in his TIFF-selected documentary Living Proof, director Mathew Embry looks at the opioid epidemic devastating North America. PainKillers features heartbreaking interviews with addicts and their loved ones, frontline healthcare workers and policy experts left questioning a public health system that favours corporate profiteers over patients. Embry and his subjects asks the audience to consider the underlying problem to this ongoing crisis:
How can our society can treat pain without causing more?