How To Survive A Plague

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

Director : David France

Year : 2013

Genre : Documentary 

Rating : ****1/2

'How To Survive A Plague' is the directorial debut for AIDS documentarian David France, an American journalist who has covered the entire epidemic from it's genesis in the early 1980's to the ways in which the virus affects lives in the present day. Telling the story of how the virus first came into being and how the American health services dealt (or didn't) with the growing death rates among homosexuals and drug users, 'How To Survive A Plague' is a very compelling, deeply disturbing and hugely affecting film that has a special place in my heart due to my love of the band Queen and of course it's lead singer, the late, very great Freddie Mercury who died of AIDS induced bronchopneumonia in 1991.

Using over 700 hours of archive footage, 'How To Survive A Plague' tells the heartbreaking but awe inspiring true story of how two powerful AIDS campaign groups ACT and TAG fought for their rights to have proper medication from a biased, hypocritical and widely homophobic health service throughout the 1980's. Telling us why and how the pharmaceutical companies lied to those afflicted with the hideous virus, 'How To Survive A Plague' shows us in sometimes graphic detail the way in which these brave men and women protested for their basic human rights even when their bodies were slowly disintegrating before their eyes. By using this amazing amount of archive footage, France does an absolutely phenomenal job of placing us in both time and place and with the help of interviews from actual AIDS survivors as well as archive testimonies from those who have since died from the debilitating illness, 'How To Survive A Plague' masterfully creates a scope of terror and overwhelming hopelessness. 

Of course, 'How I Survive The Plague' is not the first documentary movie to focus on HIV and AIDS; this year we have had the impressive 'Fire In The Blood' which explored the epidemic in Africa which opened to rave reviews. But this is the first documentary (to my knowledge) to entirely focus on the efforts of the extremely brave people who fought for their rights against a corrupt and homophobic government. It is an absolutely astonishing work that has already featured on many American critics best of 2012 lists (the UK is always the last country to get movies) and I am sure that it will feature somewhere in my top 10 in December. Brilliantly directed, very well judged and deeply upsetting, it is a lasting tribute both those who fought for their basic rights as well as the millions who needlessly died from one of the worst scourges mankind has ever known.