AIDS Documentary Serves As Silverdocs Centerpiece

The documentary film HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, an essential and passionate document about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, will serve as the Centerpiece Screening for Silverdocs on Wednesday evening. The film, directed by journalist David France, uses stirring and intimate interviews along with rare archival footage to tell the story of two coalitions that took the fight into the streets in the early years of the epidemic (the guerilla rebels of ACT UP and the TAG/Treatment Action Group that sought to influence the medical community). At a time when an HIV diagnosis was a certain death sentence and the Reagan administration did not dare to even mention the name of the disease, these were powerful and forceful movements that took on the powers that be in government and the medical establishment. The fact that less than 20 years later, AIDS has become a manageable chronic disease is due, in no small part, to the efforts of these courageous men and women, some of whom would not overcome their diagnoses and live to see the progress that their activism engendered. The film, which made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, was recently picked up by distributor Sundance Selects for an early September release.

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