How to Survive a Plague

As AIDS deaths rise in New York at the end of the eighties, the people who are ill build their own organisations. ACT UP, and TAG which came out of it, move from street actions into the scientific meetings of drug companies and government agencies; within a few years they learn enough medicine to read the trial research themselves. David France directed his first film. He was a journalist covering the movement in the eighties. The documentary is assembled almost entirely from video shot at the time. Cameras had become cheap enough that the actions, meetings and hospital rooms were recorded by the participants themselves, and France went through hundreds of hours of it. At its centre is one idea: sick people intervened directly in the science of their own treatment and changed the drug approval system. It was nominated for the documentary feature Oscar in 2013. The stories of those who died and those who lived are set side by side at the end, and that is its heaviest passage. Who it is for: viewers who like the history of activism and archive documentary. Who it is not for: anyone expecting distance; the film does not hide images of dying.