How to Survive a Plague

Drawing on a wealth of footage from inside ACT UP meetings and protests, David France’s powerful documentary How To Survive A Plague pays tribute to their courage and relentlessness...

A moving treatment of a deeply personal subject (France's own partner died of an AIDS-related illness in 1992), and an enthralling depiction of a seriously fired-up popular movement.

The film traces its dramatic history from the early 1980s to the late 90s.

...follows the drama with the immediacy of the video shot at the time, and some of its most fascinating scenes involve scientists from drug companies such as Merck explaining the slow growth of knowledge about the nature of the disease.

...teems with poignant facts and stats, but the most telling detail about this from-the-front-lines AIDS-crisis doc is that camcorders just happened to hit the market right when the disease began to spread.