LGBT Film Series at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford

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UUCM LGBT
Film Series continues with documentary “We Were Here”

Friday
night, October 18th

The Unitarian Universalist
Church of Medford’s 2013-2014 series of LGBT films continues with a showing on
Friday, October 18th of the 2011 Emmy-nominated documentary, “We
Were Here.”

The film, from Director
David Weissman, is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look
back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco in the 1980s. It
explores how the city’s inhabitants were affected by, and how they responded
to, that calamitous epidemic. But the story extends beyond San Francisco and
beyond AIDS itself, speaking to our capacity as individuals to rise to the
occasion and witnessing the incredible power of a community coming together with
love, compassion and determination.

“We Were Here” focuses on five individuals,
all of whom who lived in San Francisco prior to the epidemic. Their lives
changed in unimaginable ways when their beloved city changed from a hotbed of
sexual freedom and social experimentation into the epicenter of a terrible
sexually transmitted plague. From their different vantage points as caregivers,
activists, and researchers, as friends and lovers of the afflicted, or as people
with AIDS themselves, the interviewees share stories which are not only
intensely personal, but which also illuminate the much larger themes of that
era: the political and sexual complexities, the terrible emotional toll, the
role of women – particularly lesbians – in caring for and fighting for their
gay brothers.

Archival imagery conveys an
unusually personal and elegiac sense of San Francisco in the pre-AIDS years,
and a window into the compassionate and courageous community response to the
suffering and loss that followed. And it also conveys in a very visceral sense
the horrors of the disease itself.

Reviewing the film, Stephen Holden of the New York Times said “Of all the cinematic explorations of the AIDS
crisis, not one is more heartbreaking and inspiring than ‘We Were Here’… The
humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of
spirituality and infuse it with grace… ONE OF THE TOP TEN FILMS OF THE YEAR.”

And Jake Weinraub of TheWrap.com commented “‘We Were
Here’ revisits the voices of a lost generation, and is a film that shook this
young gay reviewer to the core, leaving a strengthened sense of historical
rootedness and pride in my community that will stay with me for the rest of my
life.”