It was a different kind of storytelling for me, after all my years of print journalism and book writing. So that’s why I turned to documentary filmmaking as a way to try and use that footage and bring it to a new audience and generation of people who may not have been there and allow them to experience it that way. So I thought I could maybe recall some of the texture of that time by going back to the footage and found that the footage itself told the story in a way that was really unique, immediate and powerful. The video camera was a relatively new kind of technology then and had been adopted pretty thoroughly by AIDS activists at the time. And so, the first thing I did was to go back and look at this incredible body of video tapes that people had collected all those years. Well, for some time I wanted to look back at the plague years in the United States and try to make sense of what happened to try and see what the legacy of those years of AIDS is and what kind of lessons have been learnt. How did documentary filmmaking become a part of your career? You have been a journalist all your life. Formerly the senior editor of Newsweek and currently functioning as a contributing editor at New York Magazine, I spoke to David France, a renowned journalist and author whose directorial debut was nominated this year for an Academy in the documentary feature category. A powerful retelling of a fledgling movement that snowballed into a revolutionary phenomenon, the film celebrates the unsung heroes of AIDS activism, underscoring that insurmountable courage can indeed shake the world. Through urgent and frantic guerrilla street antics, they barged into pharmaceutical industries, expediting the process of recognizing the right drugs for patients. Told through a string of never-seen-before video snippets filmed during the 1980’s, at a time when the AIDS epidemic had cast a shroud of fear over the united states, the documentary depicts the courageous story of a fearless army of aids activists who took to the streets to stop Aids from becoming a looming death sentence. How to Survive a Plague captures a nation at its crossroads.

How to Survive a Plague by David France