{"id":152,"date":"2011-09-13T12:52:51","date_gmt":"2011-09-13T12:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2011\/09\/aids-documentary-we-were-here-takes-emotional-trip-back-in-time.html"},"modified":"2011-09-13T12:52:51","modified_gmt":"2011-09-13T12:52:51","slug":"aids_documentary_we_were_here_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2011\/09\/aids_documentary_we_were_here_1.html","title":{"rendered":"AIDS documentary ‘We Were Here’ takes emotional trip back in time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"600x500_banner_NYT.jpg\"<\/a>Although all eyes<\/a> and ears<\/a> were on the blockbuster Contagion<\/em> this weekend, another film featuring an epidemic opened in New York City on Friday. We Were Here<\/a><\/em> chronicles San Francisco\u2019s gay community in the 1980s and 1990s as it was engulfed by the very real epidemic of AIDS<\/span>. Director David Weissman\u2019s time-traveling documentary traces the disease from its surprising emergence and examines the effect it had on a community that ultimately mobilized to hasten medical treatment.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of my friends are around from the beginning,\u201d says Daniel Goldstein<\/a>, an HIV<\/span>-positive sculptor and one of the documentary\u2019s storytellers, in the film. \u201cSo I want to tell their story as much as I want to tell my story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldstein is one of five voices that narrate the film, all of whom lived through the epidemic in San Francisco. Goldstein\u2019s story is perhaps the most striking for its emotional poignancy \u2014 he describes losing two partners to AIDS<\/span> within a decade \u2014 but each narrator dictates a distinct angle. The storytellers embrace neither self-pity nor self-promotion, and their crisp recollections immerse the audience into their community.<\/p>\n


\nOnly one of the five voices is a woman. Eileen Glutzer was a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, where she was one of the first to volunteer in the famed \u20185a\u2019 HIV ward when \u201cthere was no name for [the infection],\u201d she says. Men began appearing in the clinic with rare diseases such as Kaposi\u2019s sarcoma or pneumocystic pneumonia, and \u201cthey were dead ten days later,\u201d Glutzer says.<\/p>\n

Glutzer was not only a nurse, but organized clinical trials with Quest Clinical Research<\/a>, which still runs HIV trials today. \u201cThe reason that you wanted to do research back then is because there was nothing,\u201d she says in the documentary, \u201cand all you were doing was helping people die.\u201d<\/p>\n