Directed by David France
Transporting us back to New Yorks Greenwich Village in 1987, David Frances documentary reacquaints us with a world thats barely recognizable anymore. Its the sixth year of the AIDS epidemic and contracting the virus is tantamount to a death sentence. With casualties piling up and homophobia running rampant, theres no end in sight and hope is in short supply.
Drawing from an astonishing archive of camcorder footage shot on the front lines, France details the grassroots activism that eventually turned the tide in this life-and-death battle by making experimental drugs more readily available to the HIV-positive. Remarkably, practically every watershed moment can be found here, whether its an integral closed-door meeting of the ACT UP advocacy group or the high-profile confrontation between protestor Bob Rafsky and Bill Clinton on the 1992 presidential campaign trail. (The latter incident is credited with making AIDS an election issue.)
However, what makes this such a powerful piece is that it doesnt just serve as a comprehensive history of this activist movement. It also manages to capture its entire emotional arc, following key players through their darkest hours when determination ceded to desperation. Initially empowered by the belief they have nothing to lose, the few subjects that survive the plague now bear haunted countenances that suggest that their hard-won victory cost them more than they could ever articulate.
As one of them admits, Like any war, you wonder why you were the one who came home. In the case of his surviving compatriots, its to serve as living examples of the standard that all activists should hold themselves to. Curtis Woloschuk
