Airdate: Movie: We Were Here
This 2011 documentary about the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, has a 100% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under Programming
Tonight ABC2 screens We Were Here the 2011 documentary about the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, produced and directed by David Weissman.
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 100% approval rate.
We Were Here documents the coming of what was called the ‘Gay Plague’ in the early 1980s. The documentary focuses on 5 individuals – all of whom lived in San Francisco prior to the epidemic.
Their lives changed in unimaginable ways when their beloved city changed from a hotbed of sexual freedom and social experimentation into the epicentre of a terrible sexually transmitted plague.
From their different vantage points as caregivers, activists, researchers, as friends and lovers of the afflicted, and as people with AIDS themselves, the interviewees share stories which are not only intensely personal, but which also illuminate the much larger themes of that era: the political and sexual complexities, the terrible emotional toll, the role of women – particularly lesbians – in caring for and fighting for their gay brothers. Archival imagery conveys an unusually personal and elegiac sense of San Francisco in the pre-AIDS years, and a window into the compassionate and courageous community response to the suffering and loss that followed. And it also conveys in a very visceral sense the horrors of the disease itself.
8:30pm Sunday June 3 on ABC2.
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One Response
Thanks so much for recommending this David. I watched it last night and it was amazing – shed quite a few tears but also learnt some really crazy stuff like the way they wanted to quarantine basically the gay population of SF because they couldn’t figure out how to avoid getting it. The nurse and the guy who became a counsellor are angels on earth, the work they did was so important. Thanks again – so glad I watched it.