Michael Kirby special guest at Sydney premiere of HIV documentary
AFTER a successful Australian premiere in Melbourne during the International AIDS Conference in July, an important documentary about people living with HIV will have its NSW premiere on Wednesday night.
NSW health minister Jillian Skinner and former High Court justice Michael Kirby will be attending the premiere screening, as will a number of the young gay and lesbians featured in the film.
Thirty years in the making, Transmission: The journey from AIDS to HIV tells the powerful and human stories of people living with HIV and the activism behind society’s changing attitudes about the virus.
Blending archival footage and with interviews from the present, renowned Swedish filmmaker Stefan Hildebrand tackles the taboo issues of sex and sexuality against the backdrop of fear and misunderstanding in the 1980s and 1990s.
He also looks at how the messages of hope are delivered by the young, tech-savvy generation of today.
Hildebrand’s filming journey started in 1988 when he visited Australia as part of a global effort to document the global struggles of HIV and AIDS. He recorded footage that became part of an archive containing over 900 hours worth of footage.
In Transmission, he revisits the Australian doctors and health workers who were on the frontline of the AIDS crisis of the 80s and featured in that archive, while also retracing his steps through AIDS-ravaged Cambodia — providing two contrasting case studies of how governments responded to the epidemic.
However, the documentary has a message of hope, and a timely and moving piece, especially with World AIDS Day just around the corner.
Transmission is showing at Event Cinemas George Street on November 19. An audience Q&A session moderated by ABC’s Fran Kelly will follow.
Details and tickets: click here
Watch the trailer:
So Ita Buttrose is featured. She was shamed into becoming involved after I wrote to her as Editor-In-Chief of the Sunday Telegraph saying she had a pathological hatred of gays by giving Fred Nile a weekly column to attack gays. She wrote back using the free speech argument saying she had many gay friends and I replied sending her clippings of Nile’s columns demanding the NSW parliament reject repealing the anti-gay laws which they did four times while the column was published. She didn’t reply but a few weeks later resigned her position with the Telegraph and became head of NACAIDS.
I bloody hate how it’s like if your not in Sydney you do count. , bloody city queens
COOL