ACT UP ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Volume 1

By Jim Hubbard, Sarah Schulman and James Wentzy
90 minutes, color, USA, 2009

This film is available for rental at Public Screenings. Please send your inquiry to info@outcast-films.com.

Because the affected communities points-of-view were made invisible and real-world knowledge about the changes that needed to be made to end the AIDS crisis were ignored, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in New York City in 1987 by a group of people as a diverse, nonpartisan community united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS Crisis. One of the primary reasons ACT UP was founded was because health officials, government researchers, medical bureaucrats, doctors and pharmaceutical company executives were believed to be "AIDS experts" and held all the power over people living with AIDS.

Unfortunately cultural amnesia leads to revisionist history and so to remedy the rewriting of the history of the AIDS epidemic and the activist movement ACT UP, directors Jim Hubbard, Sarah Schulman and James Wentzy have committed themselves to exhaustively gathering, preserving and promoting the truth of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s in the form of the ACT UP Oral History Project.

We have compiled 90 minutes of interviews, out of hundreds of hours of video-recorded oral histories of members of ACT UP/New York, that largely address the issues of changing the definition of AIDS that members were faced with in the beginning of the pandemic as well as some of the highlights of the very best demonstrations the members organized in NYC including the banner waiving at Shea Stadium.