☆☆☆☆☆
The new documentary 5B, by directors Dan Krauss and Paul Haggis, joins a short list (along with David Weissman and Bill Weber's We Were Here and David France's How to Survive a Plague) of essential films about the AIDS crisis.
It's been just over 20 years since anti-retroviral drugs turned a definitively deadly disease into a chronic, though often debilitating, illness. Memories are short. 5B is a sobering reminder of just how devastating the AIDS crisis was; it killed hundreds of thousands of people, and scarred the psyche of everyone, gay or straight, who lived through it.
The earliest days of AIDS were fraught with fear and paranoia the likes of which anyone born after 1985 can't comprehend. 5B recalls a group of nurses at San Francisco General Hospital who stood firm against AIDS in a simple yet radical way: By refusing to give in to the fear. The founders of the first hospital ward specifically created for AIDS patients, they made a point of touching, interacting with and caring deeply about people who had been discarded from society.
5B uses an astonishing array of contemporary film footage interspersed with new interviews with the nurses to create a deeply moving portrait of people with extraordinary empathy. Along with these vivid characters, the filmmakers even find a compelling "villain" (one who's not named Ronald Reagan, the easy fallback in AIDS documentaries) to assemble a beautiful movie whose story of prejudice and bigotry rings disturbingly true today.
It's been just over 20 years since anti-retroviral drugs turned a definitively deadly disease into a chronic, though often debilitating, illness. Memories are short. 5B is a sobering reminder of just how devastating the AIDS crisis was; it killed hundreds of thousands of people, and scarred the psyche of everyone, gay or straight, who lived through it.
The earliest days of AIDS were fraught with fear and paranoia the likes of which anyone born after 1985 can't comprehend. 5B recalls a group of nurses at San Francisco General Hospital who stood firm against AIDS in a simple yet radical way: By refusing to give in to the fear. The founders of the first hospital ward specifically created for AIDS patients, they made a point of touching, interacting with and caring deeply about people who had been discarded from society.
5B uses an astonishing array of contemporary film footage interspersed with new interviews with the nurses to create a deeply moving portrait of people with extraordinary empathy. Along with these vivid characters, the filmmakers even find a compelling "villain" (one who's not named Ronald Reagan, the easy fallback in AIDS documentaries) to assemble a beautiful movie whose story of prejudice and bigotry rings disturbingly true today.
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