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Director: David France
How To Survive A Plague follows the group ACT Up as they fight the powers that be and their response to the Aids epidemic. The group wants more money to be put into Aids research. They want access to experimental drugs the FDA will not approve. They are more than willing to humiliate anyone they view as the enemy to prove how serious they are. Mostly they just humiliate themselves.
In my estimation you must show two sides of a subject to consider yourself a documentary. We see maybe two or three shots of various politicians saying slightly inflammatory things and this is the only opposing perspective we receive. Then in the the final half hour of the film we see our heroes admitting that most everything they did during the first hour and a half was misguided, but they redeem themselves with their actions at the end. There is no evidence in this film that the group Act Up had anything to do with the progress that has been made in Aids research. Their is also no evidence in this film that the politicians that they demonize stalled Aids research in any way. I'm sure that this film is getting the positive publicity that it is because it revolves around the scariest most deadly disease of the last 30-40 years. However if you are going to pass your film off as a documentary, as pure fact, and not an editorial then you need to give me some facts to hold on to. This is no documentary.
Director: David France
How To Survive A Plague follows the group ACT Up as they fight the powers that be and their response to the Aids epidemic. The group wants more money to be put into Aids research. They want access to experimental drugs the FDA will not approve. They are more than willing to humiliate anyone they view as the enemy to prove how serious they are. Mostly they just humiliate themselves.
In my estimation you must show two sides of a subject to consider yourself a documentary. We see maybe two or three shots of various politicians saying slightly inflammatory things and this is the only opposing perspective we receive. Then in the the final half hour of the film we see our heroes admitting that most everything they did during the first hour and a half was misguided, but they redeem themselves with their actions at the end. There is no evidence in this film that the group Act Up had anything to do with the progress that has been made in Aids research. Their is also no evidence in this film that the politicians that they demonize stalled Aids research in any way. I'm sure that this film is getting the positive publicity that it is because it revolves around the scariest most deadly disease of the last 30-40 years. However if you are going to pass your film off as a documentary, as pure fact, and not an editorial then you need to give me some facts to hold on to. This is no documentary.