When the trenchant documentary “We Were Here,” about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, screened during Denver’s Cinema Q Film Festival, Jeff Trujillo of the Colorado AIDS Project, a sponsor of the screening, was moved.
He wasn’t alone. “I heard a lot of sobbing,” he recalls.
Last week, “We Were Here” was among 15 documentaries shortlisted for an Oscar. David Weissman’s sorrow-laden yet inspiring film is a vital addition to what has now become, 30 years since HIV’s discovery, a canon of works devoted to HIV/AIDS. Without being maudlin, “We Were Here” provides perhaps the first retrospective accounting of the worst of the virus and also the best of a community.
To mark World AIDS Day, the movie will have a special screening Thursday at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. It then begins a run at the art house.
One of the reasons “We Were Here” is so affecting is because there is no shortage of choked-up moments within the film itself. Only one of its five unsparingly generous guides through those “plague years” gets out of the movie without tearing up.
But a deeper reason for its power may be because its subject is recent history. So many of us were there. I was.
My only sibling took his final breath, 20 years ago this past Monday. Kevin Kennedy was a year and a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday. He celebrated his 29th in the hospital with friends and his parents.
When he died, he was lying in a four-bed hospital room on the 11th floor of New York’s Cabrini Hospital. Charles, the man in the bed across from Kevin’s, had died a few days before. Sweet, wasting Frank, who occupied the bed next to Kevin’s, died a week after.
Parents Floyd and Geri Kennedy were standing near. Earlier in the evening they’d prayed along with some of his dearest friends. They even mumbled their way through the rosary. Which was sort of strange, because only Geri could claim even an estranged relationship to Catholicism. But then death likes the surreal wrinkle.
These were but a few of the thoughts stirred by “We Were Here.” And they took me to the peculiar sort of place that movies do sometimes.
At their best, films make the singular experience universal, while never losing their hold on the specific. They can nudge empathy. But they can also return you to your own hurt.
Hitting close to home
What must it be like to watch “Precious” if you’re a child of abuse. Or a television program that has an unexpected act of sexual violence if you’ve been a victim of sexual assault? The list could go on, of course.
I wonder how my brother felt watching AIDS films. When he died — and he is but one of 33 million who have — the arts were starting to address the crisis. Not surprisingly, the early films were independents, among them: 1986’s “Parting Glances” which featured an impossibly young Steve Buscemi as a rocker with AIDS; and 1989’s “Longtime Companion.” On a winter’s night, Kevin arrived at the offices of the alternative weekly I worked at in New York City ashen and wrecked. He’d seen “Longtime Companion” by himself.
Why’d he do that to himself? Fear but courage, too, I think.
Still 1993 had the feel of a pop-culture turning point (followed by the breakthrough discovery of the “cocktail” drug therapy). Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” landed on Broadway. Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia” would win Tom Hanks an Oscar for his portrayal of a lawyer who needed one (played by Denzel Washington) to sue his company for AIDS discrimation. HBO aired “And the Band Played On,” based on San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ damning 1987 account of the political and scientific battles that slowed the nation’s response to AIDS.
Returns us to worst
With sharp archival footage and a cache of personal photos, “We Were Here” plunges viewers into the worst of those years anew in a way that nevertheless offers fresh lessons about how grassroots responses can save lives during public health crises. But the film’s power as a requiem for the lost is undeniable.
Kevin Kennedy had the long arms of a successful swimmer, which he was for a spell as a teen. He had a gift for storytelling that limned the border between yarn and fib. The performer in him served him well when he bolted from Denver to Paris and began translating for American students and taking classes at the French cooking school La Varenne. He was, as Joni Mitchell sings, “a free man in Paris,” and I’m not sure he’d have returned to the U.S. in 1989 had he not gotten sick with a strange yet intractable illness.
Given my own tears, perhaps it was a foolish question to put to “We Were Here” director Weissman, but then news anchors rehash the heartrending nightly with practiced gravity and botox-injected facial expression. Did you cry while making the film?
“Doing the interviews was very emotional — for the crew and myself, as well as for the interviewees,” Weiss wrote in an e-mail from the Netherlands. “Editor Bill Weber and I cried quite regularly in the editing room, though there was a point when we realized that we were not crying because it was sad, but we were crying at things that were beautiful.” Indeed.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com
