“We Were Here” at Reel Love Film Fest
This weekend is Reel Love, an LGBT film festival showing films centered around issues prominent in the LGBT community. Of the films is “We Were Here,” a documentary showing the effects of AIDS when it first entered the annals of American history.
“We Were Here” delivers a combination of powerful interviews and captivating original footage to create a striking depiction of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. Starting from the years before members of the gay community began dying from the virus, the film builds off of its five interviewees’ experiences of the disastrous spread of an often fatal illness. From the onset of the virus, the film goes on to explore the response of the LGBT community in San Francisco and the nation at large. From the politics to the personal, the film touches all the bases with a disease that left a wide-spread affect on everyone who had heard the word “AIDS.”
While the film gets a lot of mileage out of the Ken Burns Effect, the pictures shown are often powerful. The photographs of pock-marked AIDS sufferers are especially poignant when juxtaposed with interviews of people describing losing most of their friends during the epidemic.
The interviewees are a fascinating cross-section of the Castro Street population. They range from an artist to a nurse to a volunteer in a ward that saw sometimes six fatalities from AIDS in a day. Each perspective imparts new information that paints an affecting image of what life during the AIDS epidemic was like.
Sometimes the interviews seem fragmented. A few of the interviewees mention names as if the audience should know them, when the back-story is just part of a bucket of deleted footage. This small detail does not detract from the experience of an otherwise professional film, but does put the film one step further from the kind of antiseptically clean editing of big-budget documentaries.
Ultimately, the film delivers a story that is at once frightening, informative, and sometimes heartwarming. It is worth a watch for anyone born after the decline of the AIDS scare, which is probably anyone who finds themselves reading this article.
