The Culture of AIDS

INTERVIEW

Global Vision

Director Rory Kennedy Talks to Aaron Krach About Pandemic, a New HBO Documentary with an International Scope

"Believe it or not," says Rory Kennedy, director of Pandemic, airing June 15 on HBO. "I pulled back significantly from what I could have shown."

Kennedy is discussing a scene early in her important, realistic, and powerful five-part film. Each thirty-minute episode captures life in an HIV hot spot–Thailand, Russia, Uganda, India, and Brazil. The first segment follows Lek, a twenty-seven-year-old woman with AIDS who lives in a hospice where people with AIDS die every day; a crematorium on the premises is used every day. The crematory operator is shown loading bodies in and firing up the machine.

Then devastation appears. After a body is consumed, the ashes and leftover bones are raked out methodically. The caretaker might as well be cleaning leaves off a front porch in fall. He’s turned off his emotions in order to do his job, to guarantee that each soul is transported to the afterlife uncontaminated by mixing with anyone else’s ashes.

"The reality of dying is painful and gruesome," Kennedy says. "And real and true and final. I think it’s easy to forget the reality when you’re talking about [death abstractly]. I also think it’s important to show the hope. I believe in hope…but the reality is that millions are dying."

The HBO airing Pandemic–narrated by Elton John–is the center of a multimedia launch of AIDS awareness activities: Classroom versions of Pandemic are being distributed; a large photo exhibition of images from the crisis is touring care of Umbrage Editions; and public service announcements and a CD featuring music from the film have been produced. There is also an extensive Web site:

www.pandemicfacingaids.com.

Five million people infected this year alone, and forty million currently infected worldwide. Twenty-four million people have died so far. Thirteen million children have been orphaned when their parents died of AIDS.

These are the painful statistics of a global pandemic. They are easy to write, not too difficult to read, but are impossible to illustrate. Kennedy, with producing partner Liz Garbus, come very close to fully illustrating the worldwide scope with their film. By focusing on the macro and the micro, the enormity of the statistics and the impact on individuals, they are able to tell a story that has been left off television and movie screens for far too long.

Each of Pandemic’s five segments focuses on an individual or couple living with (and often dying from) AIDS. Whether it’s a poor straight couple in India or a gay man in Brazil, the stories begin about types. Then the beauty of Kennedy’s filmmaking kicks in. A moment in each segment arrives when AIDS slips under the skin of the narrative and the issues of parents and children or lovers versus friends bubble up.

"I picked up on it quickly, but it wasn’t something we went in focusing on," Kennedy says about the film’s emphasis on families. "But as a documentary filmmaker, I know that more intimate stories arise within families so it’s an area I tend to focus on."

Pandemic is not Kennedy’s first stint behind the camera. She’s made more than a dozen non-fiction films on topics ranging from social justice and drugs use/abuse to mentally handicapped parents and the very real struggles of teenagers growing up in America. The Manhattan-based filmmaker’s very first film dealt with HIV, "Fire In Our House," a ten-minute video about needle exchange programs in Chicago, Santa Cruz, and New York.

Yet in spite of her extensive experience, Pandemic held unique challenges of its own. Each story involved a separate trip (except for India and Thailand which could be combined). Each journey allowed only a week to ten days of filming. Research was done beforehand, subjects were lined up, but sometimes it wouldn’t be until Kennedy, her cameraman and producer (it was usually a crew of only three) arrived and had to decide what to shoot on the scene.

From beginning to end, Pandemic took fourteen months to make. The film had its premiere at the World AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, last fall.

"The response was good," Kennedy says. "The premiere was somewhat anxiety-producing because we’d finished the film just a week before, and also because it was an audience that was very aware of AIDS and the global issues involved. I really cared what they thought. I very much wanted to make a film that spoke to that audience."

The beauty is–if one can use that word here–that Pandemic is not just for those who know about AIDS. It is exceptional storytelling. It is quite likely to catch the attention of anyone turning on HBO in June. Anyone lucky enough to catch an unexpected glimpse of Kennedy’s film will likely stop flipping the channels. They will learn something, and mostly likely be moved.

Aaron Krach can be reached at aaron@aaronkrach.com