Films

How to Survive a Plague

Picture. Directed by David French republic. Public Square Films. 2012. 109 minutes.
This documentary is about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease.

Time Periods: Mail-Civil Rights Era: 1975 - 2000

Themes: LGBTQ, Organizing

The 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague tells the riveting and heartbreaking story of the founding and growth of Human activity UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Ability), a central histrion in the struggle to pressure drug companies and the U.Southward. authorities to aggressively pursue a treatment and cure for AIDS. Through rich and intimate archival material — home videos made past the activists themselves, news broadcasts, footage of protests — viewers acquire nigh the men and women who comprised Deed UP, many of whom were sick with the virus themselves, and come across, in real fourth dimension, how their assuming civil disobedience was born, cultivated, honed, and mobilized at key moments in the struggle. The filmmakers do not reveal, until the finish, who amid the original cadre of activists lived to do good from the discovery of an effective treatment for AIDS; this strategy both makes for incredibly powerful viewing and serves to remind u.s. that the political fight for these activists was literally a matter of life and death.

For those using this film in the electric current moment of the coronavirus pandemic, at that place are lots of rich connections to be made. Commencement, educators might ask students to think most how marginalized groups' feel of affliction is affected by oppressive structures like racism and homophobia. It is fair to say that the homophobia of men similar Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush killed millions of people equally these politicians dragged their feet in addressing a disease that, at first, seemed to be killing more often than not gay men. Just every bit AIDS became inextricably tied to homosexuality, so too did President Trump label coronavirus a Chinese virus, stirring upward anti-Asian hatred and spreading misinformation. And merely every bit the poorest people on the globe have been disproportionately killed by AIDS, and so as well are we seeing outsized numbers of coronavirus infections and deaths among Black and Dark-brown people in the United states. Second, the ACT UP activists sought to democratize the biomedical bureaucracy — drug research, trials, the FDA blessing process — so that the people most affected by its decisions could have a seat at the table. Students might call back about to what extent working people today in the United States have a voice in determining the priorities of the health intendance system. One imagines that were nurses and hospital aides given existent vocalization in government, in that location would exist no shortage of PPE. Finally, the film raises a key question for the current moment: What kind of activism do we need for this plague, coronavirus? How to Survive a Plague reveals the nitty-gritty procedure of organizers hatching actions that lucifer the moment; for students, it might serve as inspiration to consider what actions they might hatch today.

Appropriate for high school classrooms — history, science, language arts.

Trailer