Nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature earlier this year, How To Survive A Plague arrives on these shores this week. With a engrossing yet intimate scope, the film examines the outbreak of the AIDS virus in the 1980’s and specifically its impact in Greenwich Village, New York. Faced with underwhelming medical advancement and indifferent political reaction, a diverse group of young men and women facing almost certain death banded together to found activist group ACT UP. Refusing to die quietly, they took their plight and struggle into the public domain and doggedly began a chain reaction that would turn AIDS from being nearly hundred percent lethal into a manageable disease. Director David France employs a wealth of archive footage and interviews with surviving activists to tell this remarkable story.

Rather than settle for a standard talking head format that many documentary features use, France takes the bold approach of solely using existing archival footage for the vast majority of the films running time. Nearly 700 hours of home videos, news reports,testimonial footage and art protest videos have been whittled down to just under two with contemporary interview audio layered over the soundtrack. This approach reminded me of the brilliant documentary Senna, which also employed little seen existing footage to fill in for contemporary replacements. Like that films director, France realizes that he has an absolute goldmine at his disposal and that the images alone speak volumes. The confrontation between activist Bob Rafsky and then senator Bill Clinton is well documented enough (‘I feel your pain’). But there are numerous stirring and even jaw dropping scenes of protests, rallies, and interviews that convey the monumental struggle in all of its resilience. Ugly undercurrents of homophobia saw many victims of the disease meet indifference or outright hostility from what should in theory be American societies most supportive institutions; the healthcare industry and the Catholic church. One extraordinary sequence focuses on a mass ‘die in’ protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as protesters called out the church’s dismissal of condoms and the AIDS crisis altogether.

In the midst of the drama and tragedies that defined the era, France never loses focus of the figures at the centre of all of this. As the film reaches its later stages we are treated to a more conventional talking head interview format with surviving activists but this change in style is fully justified by the emotional arc that they, and in course the audience, have been on by that point. This was not simply a fight for political and social rights; it was a battle for life itself with no room for compromise. Many moments captured on camera here are raw and emotionally devastating. A rally culminating with the ashes of AIDS victims scattered across the White House lawn is utterly heartbreaking. If there is a crescendo to the grief and anguish of this generation, it comes from acclaimed playwright Larry Kramer silencing a group of squabbling, divided activists. ‘Plague! We are in the middle of a plague!’ he bellows. His voice cuts through the discourse and chills to the bone of the audience.  It’s a statement that sums up the battle that this community had to face together, and one that they overcame with unity, humour and dignity. It’s a statement, and a cause, that deserves to be heard and remembered and this film is brilliant testament to that.