Big Gay Picture Show

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema and more

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema & more

Acclaimed HIV/AIDS Docs How To Survive A Plague & Fire In The Blood Head To DVD In The UK In March

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how-to-survive-and-fire-in-the-blood-dvd-coversIt’s been announced that two award-winning and critically acclaimed documentaries looking at HIV and AIDS activism will be released on DVD in the UK in March 2014. Following their cinema releases, Fire In The Blood will come out on 24th March, while How To Survive A Plague is released on 31st March, ahead of the BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival, which runs 20th-30th March 2014.

Fire In The Blood is the critically-acclaimed documentary about medicine, monopoly and malice that tells the story of how Western pharmaceutical companies and governments aggressively blocked access to low-cost AIDS drugs for the countries of Africa and the global south in the years after 1996. The film investigates how this caused over ten million unnecessary deaths and the improbable group of people who decided to fight back.

The film tells its remarkable story through the eyes of AIDS patients, front-line clinicians, radical health professionals, pharmaceutical company executives and global figures including Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Joseph Stiglitz.

The film screened at Sundance Film Festival (2013 Grand Jury Prize nominee – World Cinema Documentary) and its message is clear: despite dramatic past victories, the fight for access to life-saving medicine is almost certainly just beginning. It won the 2013 DOXA Feature Documentary Award, 2013 Justice Matters Award at the 27th Washington DC International Film Festival, the inaugural Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Prize for Political Film, and Best Debut Film of a Director at the Mumbai International Film Festival.

How To Survive A Plague is the Best Documentary Oscar-nominated story of two coalitions – ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment Action Group) – and how their activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these self-made, largely LGBT activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.

With access to a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage from the 1980s and 1990s, filmmaker David France puts the viewer smack in the middle of the controversial actions, the heated meetings, the heartbreaking failures, and the exultant breakthroughs of heroes in the making.

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Chatting With How To Survive A Plague Director David France

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The excellent AIDS documentary How To Survive A Plague is out in UK cinemas now. We caught up with director David France to talk about the film and how it got made.

It’s a great movie, giving an excellent over view of the emergence of AIDS and the groups that sprang up in the gay community to fight back against official complacency and antipathy, as well as the fact potentially helpful drugs were being held up before they became available to those with HIV and AIDS.

You can read our review here, but make sure you take a look at what the director has to say above. [Read more…]

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How To Survive A Plague (Cinema)

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I was alive during the early days of the AIDS epidemic but was too young to really understand what was going on. It’s always shocking to see something like How To Survive A Plague, about events that took place while I was around but which seem so far from a world where gay people are increasingly being allowed to get married. Sure there are still problems but it’s incredible that just 20-30 years ago politicians were happy to allow millions around the world to die, just because they didn’t want to be seen to doing anything that might help gay people. [Read more…]

Oscar Nominated Doc How To Survive A Plague To Become A TV Mini-series

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how-to-survive-a-plague-posterAt last week’s Oscars the documentary How To Survive A Plague lost on a gong, but it now seems it’s going to have a longer life than most of its fellow nominees, as plans are afoot to turn it into a mini-series for the ABC TV network.

The documentary tells the story of the brave young men and women, most of whom where gay, who in the 1980s successfully reversed the tide of an epidemic, demanded the attention of a fearful nation and stopped AIDS from becoming a death sentence. This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and, with no scientific training, infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time.

In the process, they saved their own lives and ended the darkest days of a veritable plague, while virtually emptying AIDS wards in American hospitals in the process.

THR reports that the documentary’s director, David France, is teaming up with ABC to turn the true tale into a TV mini-series. The adaptation is in the early stages at the moment, but France says he’d like to go further than the film, “We know we’d like it to be an extended story that’s not just about AIDS and what AIDS wrought but about this tremendous civil rights movement that grew from the ashes of AIDS and the dawn of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement.”

It will be ABC’s first mini-series in more than half a decade. Indeed it’s suggested that while France has been interested in the idea for over a year, it was only after the success of Hatfield & McCoys that an adaptation began to get some traction with the TV networks.

It is unusual for a mainstream network to take on a subject that will be do unapologetically gay, but France compares it to what ABC did for race relations with Roots in the 1970s. “ABC is the network of Roots,” says France. “For ABC, this is a continuation of a dialogue that they’ve had with their viewers and with history, and that to me was the most decisive and convincing fact in our discussion — this idea that we can do that again and that we can be that for the gay community.”

Let’s hope the network executives don’t get scared off by the subject matter as it gets closer to the screen.

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How To Survive A Plague Poster Revealed

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A couple of weeks ago we posted the trailer for the powerful new documentary How To Survive A Plague, about the early days of AIDS epidemic and the brave people who took a stand and forced change. The film reaches US cinemas on September 21st (but as yet it doesn’t appear a UK release has been set), and ahead of that a new poster has been released.

Here’s the synopsis: ‘HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE is the story of the brave young men and women who successfully reversed the tide of an epidemic, demanded the attention of a fearful nation and stopped AIDS from becoming a death sentence. This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and, with no scientific training, infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time. In the process, they saved their own lives and ended the darkest days of a veritable plague, while virtually emptying AIDS wards in American hospitals in the process. The powerful story of their fight is a classic tale of empowerment and activism that has since inspired movements for change in everything from breast cancer research to Occupy Wall Street. Their story stands as a powerful inspiration to future generations, a road map, and a call to arms. This is how you change the world.

‘Official Selection: Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New films, San Francisco International FF, Provincetown FF, Outfest Documentary Centerpiece, Seattle International FF’

You can find out more at the film’s official website.

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