We Were Here

An amazing work. I just saw this with a friend who was too young to really remember what was going on in the late 80's and 90's. We both cried throughout the film, a good thing. It was a healing response for me, having lost too many friends and acquaintances. I am plenty grateful for this opportunity to hear the "survivors'" share in hindsight with such clarity. I knew what was going on in San Francisco proper through others' experiences, but nothing nearly as comprehensive as this film. My experience was in the military and my friends' being sent home when they tested positive ('86-'88), which was a death sentence at that time and then in the Montrose in Houston after the military. Thank you so very much for making this difficult but vital film. It will stand as a powerful reminder of what was and teach generations to come.

I went to see "We Were Here" today at the Cinéma-Village theater in New York. I was afraid it would disappear before I got the chance to see it. This movie was recommended by a friend who is a producer at KQED in San Francisco as being the ultimate resource on San Francisco during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Along with Randy Shilts's seminal book, "And the Band Played on," he was certainly right.

One great element of "We Were Here" is that it gives several quite different perspectives on what the HIV epidemic in San Francisco was like at that time: Ed, the misfit who found his place in the gay community by volunteering with people with AIDS early in the epidemic; Daniel, the Jewish artist who felt he had found his true family among San Francisco's gay men and then lost them all within a few painful years; Paul, the high-profile political activist; Guy, the big-hearted, philosophical black flower vendor; and Eileen, the lesbian nurse who served at ground zero of the epidemic and stuck with it with grit and compassion to the end.

Like Ed, I didn't fit in well in the "gay community" during my years in San Francisco. So disconnected was I that I did not know a lot of what was happening in the early and mid-1980s, although I remember Guy the florist, who always had a smile for every passerby on the street corner where he worked, and I remember James Harning, a beautiful young man who died a hard death in 1992. "We Were Here" helped me understand much of what was going on all around me in those days. It will do the same for others who weren't "there," for reasons of either age or geography, and it will be a moving, bittersweet reminder for those who did survive those difficult years in San Francisco.

This U.S. documentary chronicles the severe effect of AIDS on San Francisco 's gay community from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

The main structure of this film is interviews with four gay men and a lesbian who lived in San Francisco during the tumultuous period. One of the interviewees is HIV positive. All interviewees are very likeable and eloquent. There are moments of fighting back tears while recalling sad times. These moments were very genuine and did not seem manipulative by the filmmakers.

The recollections begin in the 1970s when sexual liberation brought many gay people to San Francisco . It continues with the disease of AIDS when its causes were unknown, the onslaught of illnesses and deaths, the changes within the community along with the prejudices of the extreme right, and a new activism followed by drug cocktails that could prolong lives of those living with HIV.

This documentary is blessed with great footage. There were several photographs and archived film footage of the past including those of the interviewees at much younger ages. This footage also included details of skin lesions and extreme thinness of AIDS patients before they died. A before-and-after image of a man who was vibrant and muscular before the disease is shocking as is a San Francisco magazine that listed several pages of photographs of those who died of AIDS in one particular year in the 1980s.

The film is not all grim despite its content. The interviewees show lightness and humour when appropriate. While the occurrence of AIDS deaths has significantly decreased since the 1990s, this film is a solid reminder of a very dark period in recent history. The bad memories return quickly. - dbamateurcritic

I saw this film as part of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. At the time of this story (the 80's) the AIDS epidemic was something we read about in newspapers and magazines, at a safe distance so to speak. What I remember most was the long time it took before the underlying causes became clear. There were several theories at first, because no one could find a common denominator for two target groups that suffered most: hard drugs addicts and homosexuals. Nowadays, it is easy for us to see the connection as being obvious.

What we easily overlooked at that time was the impact it had on people that were hit, in combination with the hopelessness of their situation in the absence of a cure. Two quotes I can't wipe from my mind: [1] "Can't go on like this" at a moment that many friends and acquaintances died, without any effective remedy in sight. And quote [2] "Don't want to come out of this war like my father came out of the war he fought in", as if wondering how the world would be after this bad interval was over, and whether residual trauma's were to be expected. Not only quotes like these, but also the honest stories told by survivors that were interviewed, certainly left an impression on us.

All in all, I could do nothing more than giving the maximum score (5 out of 5) for the audience award when leaving the theater. We saw a very comprehensive overview of how people (re)acted on the disease, presented by all sorts of people involved. It also makes us think about possible new diseases that may befall on us. For example bird flu (H5N1) springs to mind, due to a recent publication about related work in Rotterdam (NL). While imagining that such a virus breaks loose, either this one or a new one for that matter, it is difficult to suppress post-apocalyptic visions about what may happen.

I didn't know my eyes could produce this many tears. It's the most effective talking-heads documentary I've ever seen. Forget the cloying trash that they make today about the AIDS epidemic. This is the real deal.