Review of How to Survive a Plague (2012) by Mike N — 09 Feb 2013

For those whose education on the history of the AIDS crisis came from Angels in America, one assumes that once AZT hit the scene, the hardship was over. How To Survive A Plague, a brilliant patchwork of interviews and an astounding amount of historical footage, documents the struggle for AIDS activists freedom to survive.

Standing out as the best in a year of great documentaries, Plague captures the anger of the time, while showing not just the struggle in front of the ACT UP coalition, but the struggle from within, serving as a warning for how any political movement can be torn apart by a few fringe extremists.

Though every time you get swept up in the story of the group as a parable for Occupy Wall Street's failure or whatever political movement you want to connect it to, the film finds the right moment to jump back in with the severity of the matter at hand.

In the middle of a heated debate about policy during an ACT Up meeting, Normal Heart author Larry Kramer interjects that "We're in the middle of a fucking plague! And this is how you behave?" By waiting until the end to tell you who of those we followed was lost and who are still suffering, the film not only shows how far we've come, but how much is still left to be done.