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For a cause

The India Habitat Centre organised screening of two films on AIDS

Over five million and still counting! The number of HIV positive patients in India is on the rise. While HIV is taking epidemic proportions, it has been widely established that ignorance has been the culprit.

India Habitat Centre, this past week saw the screening of two documentary films, each giving a different take on life with HIV. The Burning Issue and Some Burning Questions, a film by Public Service Broadcasting Trust, directed by Abhijit Dasgupta, provided an insight into the lives of such patients in Kolkata, their struggle against social stigma and discrimination. Through candid interviews, a people afflicted with HIV virus faced the camera without the usual masking of faces. Sharing their experiences and agonies, they urged others to learn from their mistakes. `Shunned', `ostracised', `cold-shouldered' are some terms that relate their tale of woes.

The film, however, received a mediocre response from the audience and was criticised by the expert panel for its non-contemporary nature and its conspicuous silence over sex. "Twenty-five years into the epidemic and the film was struck in time", said Anjali Gopalan, Executive Head of Naz Foundation India. "However, the film could be useful for creating discussions over fighting stigma," she added.

Intimate account

The second film "To Live is Better than to Die", directed by Weijun Chen was short-listed for Grierson Awards 2004. The film outlined a view of the HIV-infected people in the most populous nation China. Zeroing in on a family in the Central Henan Province, where around 60 percent of the population is carrying the virus, the film was an intimate account of their daily struggles. "It was interesting to see the juxtaposition of the two radically different films. The first film runs a danger of categorising people living with AIDS whereas the second film emphasises that lives of the patients do not necessarily revolve around the disease," said Akshay Khanna, an expert on the issue.

The experts also discussed at length the need to overcome inhibition of talking explicitly about the disease particularly among the middle class. Moreover the approach of targeting communities like truckers and sex-workers has been overdone and the issue now needed to be taken to the middle strata of the society, the experts concluded.

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