How does a community keep pushing forward, when the tendency is not to plan any further than one week away? Director David Weissman has a theory.

“You don’t really have a choice. You’re there, it’s happening, and it becomes the new normal…After panic and terror of a crisis, once you realize that it’s not going away, you have to somehow normalize it. It’s like people living in wartime – if you’re always aware of it, it makes you crazy.”

In San Francisco during the height of the AIDS Crisis, Weissman says there was a juxtaposition of normalcy and insanity all around. Remembering that sad juxtaposition is the mission of WE WERE HERE, one of the very best documentaries I’ve seen at this years Hot Docs festival.

30 years after the fact, WE WERE HERE takes a long look at the days of the “Gay Plague” in San Francisco. During the 80’s and 90’s in the City by the Bay thousands were dying from a new disease known as AIDS. Information was hard to come by, and treatment was experimental at best. It was a tough enough situation on its own, but when you add in the associated homophobia the entire problem gets multiplied to the hundredth power.

Those troubled times claimed many lives, but there are those that survived. Weissman brings them together in WE WERE HERE to talk about life during this difficult era.

I can’t remember the last time a doc made me cry as much as I did during WE WERE HERE. Matter of fact, I can’t remember the last doc to make me cry. The film is permeated by a sadness, but in such a beautiful way. It isn’t interested in preaching, or ranting, or beating its chest and wailing. What it wants to do is honour the sons of San Francisco lost during this era, and celebrate their memory. Its a eulogy…but to a much larger congregation than usual.

Through the stories and photos we experience, Weissman creates a tapestry to tell the tale: The tale of those who survived, and the tale of those who have gone. Much the same way that one speaker in the film describes an AIDS ward as “a terrible and beautiful place at the same time”, the film brings together the laughter and the tears of the era.

It’s a call to arms – not just for AIDS activism, but for human perseverance. WE WERE HERE wants us all to look at people who were surrounded by confusion and death, and how they fought back by coming together. Even now, none of the people we meet in the film are interested in looking back in anger. While on the surface it seems like they have every right to be angry (many in America turned their back on the entire crisis), the people brought together in this film are a testament to an amazing political action that paved the way for great change.

That is the true legacy of The AIDS Crisis in San Francisco. That the community galvanized, refused to accept this “new normal” and pushed for solutions, changes, and for their call to be answered. Their love for life, and for one-another, gave them the most important weapon to facilitate real change: That weapon was hope.

For as a great man once said, “Hope will never be silent”.

WE WERE HERE plays tomorrow – 9:30pm at The Lightbox, and again on Thursday May 5th – 1:45pm at The ROM.