I often feel that the best political
documentaries are the ones that make you want to throw your laptop against the
wall in disgust (if that is your chosen method of viewing). The ones that you bore all of your friends as
you talk about it for weeks, recollecting the injustices acutely as your
heartbeat rises dangerously… these are the films that given enough attention
have the potential to change the world for the better.
The latest example of this is Dylan Mohan
Grey’s Fire In The Blood, a perfect
companion piece with David France’s How
To Survive A Plague. France’s film
was a narrative made of archive footage filmed from the early AIDS activists in
New York as they tried to change the law surrounding AZT, the controversial toxic
medicine for the virus. After 15 years
of campaigning, with many deaths and horrors, a cocktail of anti-retro virals
were made available at an enormous price that managed to suppress some of the
symptoms of the disease.
Grey’s film picks up the story after the
medicine is widely available at a price in the Western world, and looks at how
the drugs were suppressed in Africa and the poorer Eastern world. The very same people who were protesting for
the drugs in America were lobbying to prevent Africans from taking the same
drugs incase they ‘misused’ them, leading to a mutated virus re-infecting the
healthier Western AIDS victims.
