The Movie

Ten years after its birth, as well as forty years after the first diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, the association PLUS Persone LGBT+ Sieropositive of Bologna tells its story, which is intertwined with that of the Italian LGBT movement, retracing the events of sero-activism in Italy

The Project

On June 5, 1981, at the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, United States, a disease that would later be called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was first recognized. Today, 40 years later, in the world there are still about 38 million people living with HIV. In Italy, 80% of people who have discovered they are HIV positive in the last year are male; for the first time, the share of new diagnoses attributable to MSM is equal to that attributable to heterosexual intercourse. The share of late diagnoses continues to increase, and can seriously compromise the success of therapy. In 2011 was born PLUS, Persone LGBT Sieropositive Onlus, the first Italian organization and network of LGBT+ HIV positive people.

All the social aspects of HIV, from stigma to fear, from loneliness to awareness, too often left to the solitary management of the individual person with HIV, are treated by the association with the awareness of the weight they have on people’s lives, coming to affect even the clinical management of the infection. The fight that PLUS carries on, aware that HIV can be defeated, perhaps, only by fighting together on a scientific and social level, goes far beyond the medical level or, moreover, only the hospital level. HIV cannot be defeated only with drugs, much less with a vaccine, just as hepatitis A and B have not been defeated. But as of today, the social plan has decidedly less important spaces, and HIV is not decreasing as one would expect given the successes of research.

The Movie

I’m Still Here, a SMK Factory production, directed by Cecilia Fasciani, is a docufilm that tells the story of the association PLUS LGBT+ HIV positive people in the year of its tenth anniversary, as well as the 40th anniversary of the first reports on what would later be called HIV/AIDS. Today, more than ever, in the midst of a new global pandemic, art and cinema assume a crucial role in developing a historical memory as a collective gear, which becomes a common heritage and helps society to question itself. 

The plot is structured around the stories of the protagonists and founders of the association, interwoven with archival sources and historical memory of the city. The history of sero-activism in Italy, from its origins to the present day, is retraced from a historical as well as a social and political point of view, highlighting the changes in terms of advocacy occurred over the decades, as well as the activities that the association carries out daily on the territory. 

The city of Bologna becomes at the same time frame and co-protagonist of the narration, urban space in which past and contemporary events are intertwined in the images of the film. Since the 1980s, Bologna has been the fulcrum and the cultural center of the Italian gay movement, and it still plays an important role in the national political dynamics. From the birth of Circolo XXVIII Giugno to the taking of Cassero in Porta Saragozza in 1982, and the foundation of Arcigay in 1985. Today it is a very different city, with complex dynamics and whose contradictions will emerge in the course of the narrative.

HIVisible

The topic of HIV is today very much invisibilized, and the needs of people living with HIV are not considered within the public discourse. Being able to put back at the center the bodies and the stories of people living with HIV is therefore especially fundamental today, as well as raising the issue of their visibility within the public space, so that they are not relegated only to institutional and scientific conferences. A crucial role is played by art and the collective discourse that is produced around it, as demonstrated by the importance that PLUS gives to this issue and the example of Paolo Gorgoni/Paula Lovely, whose performance art shows performed in public spaces have succeeded in functioning as a sounding board for the needs of people living with HIV at an international level. Moments that from individual have become collective, as on the occasion of #HIVisibile2gether.  

The distribution

The long story of HIV is one that concerns everyone. After the end of the dramatic phase of the 80s and 90s of the last century, we have not been able as a society to reason, question and collectively re-elaborate the great changes and developments in the history of the pandemic, and its impact on people’s lives from a social and political point of view. That’s why we believe that cinema, and documentary cinema in particular, can also play a role of change within this process. And it can also do so by questioning a production and distribution system that marginalizes independent productions, exclusively following the logic of profit in which elements such as quality, counter-information, social value and denunciation are crushed. Not only by imagining new forms of production/distribution, but also new forms of economic and community support, to give this story the distribution possibilities we think it can reach.

How you can help us

There are two ways that we can help distribute the film nationally and internationally:

1 – help us in the diffusion of the film

2 – organize in your area a screening of our movie through the specific webpage “Organizza una proiezione”