At first they staged dramatic street-theater protests aimed at forcing bureaucrats to increase research spending, but street theater alone could not save lives. Our story begins in 1987, as we meet the unlikely ensemble of fiercely intelligent young men and women who formed ACT UP, the history-changing activist group, including: a formerly-closeted Wall Street bond trader, a drama school drop-out who channeled Bette Davis, a nightclub denizen in a black bomber jacket, a teenage runaway with a GED, a bisexual avant-garde video artist, and an established PR pro among them. Here is a story of how nonviolent activists changed history – and set a model for subsequent activists in other diseases like breast cancer here and political settings abroad, as the “Arab Spring” has shown. How to Survive a Plague is an astounding untold story of patient activism and innovation - about AIDS survival, not death - which has been overlooked until this important and timely documentary, culled from a trove of never-before-seen archival footage and edited together in verité style to bring the viewer back over two decades to an urgent time of rampant death, political indifference, and amazing resilience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |