By Sara Vilkomerson, The New York Observer
A Production Still From ‘All of Us’ [Photo: Jennifer Kennedy, Amani Willet, Anna Wolf]
It’s hard enough to get mainstream movies made and distributed (even Jennifer Aniston’s Toronto film Management is still looking for a buyer), let alone get them seen—do we even need to lament again the fact that no one wants to see anything to do with the war? So we admire the fact that a movie like All of Us will even make it into theaters. Because this documentary—about a young doctor in the South Bronx researching why heterosexual black women are being infected with H.I.V. at disproportionately high rates—may be incredibly interesting, but it’s also terribly depressing.
Emily Abt’s first film, Take It From Me, was a feature-length exploration of welfare reform, so she must be conditioned to tackling projects on topics that people would rather ignore. In All of Us, Dr. Mehret Mandefro, a Harvard-educated young doctor originally from Ethiopia, is followed by cameras as she meets with various women afflicted with H.I.V. She becomes the heart and face of the film, and as far as faces go, Ms. Abt couldn’t have found a better one: Dr. Mandefro looks more like a movie star than most movie stars, and the contrast between her and the women in her outreach program couldn’t be more stark. There’s Chevelle, who was addicted to drugs and dependent on sex with men to feed her addiction, now clean and hoping to marry her also-positive boyfriend, who is showing early signs of dementia. Then there’s the heartbreaking Tara, who was first sexually abused at the age of 5, and in addition to H.I.V. suffers from cervical cancer. Her boyfriend is still pressuring her to have sex, even after large parts of her genitalia have been hacked away in surgery. Who wants more popcorn?
Ms. Abt’s aim seems to be to show a sisterhood, but if anything she demonstrates the horrific chasm between the conditions Dr. Manderfro’s subjects have found themselves in and those of other, visible American women. (One thing seems to be universal: Dr. Mandefro, who could teeter on the edge of being just a little too perfect and well meaning, suddenly becomes all too human when she talks about her disappointment when the man she is dating hasn’t called.) Ms. Abt brings out the best in her subjects: Tara and Chevelle and their partners are fully realized, not just poster children for the cause. In the production notes, Ms. Abt said she made All of Us to “spark dialogue and social change especially among young women who I believe are on the frontlines of tremendous personal risk.” Now let’s just hope they’ll go and see it.
All of Us opens Friday at Cinema Village.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 19, 2008
Contact: Desta, Public Relations, TruthAIDS, [email protected], 917-302-3694
Umuna Mimi Ghirmay, Community Organizer, TruthAIDS, [email protected], 703-725-6364
Bob Fullilove, President, University of Orange, [email protected], 212-305-4734
Dr. Mehret Mandefro, TruthAIDS Founding Executive Director and the featured physician in the documentary film All of Us, is taking the learning to the next level. She is inviting all who have seen the film, all interested in solidarity, public health, social justice, and civic engagement to take her online course on “Mass Collaborations” at the University of Orange where she is the Professor of Social Medicine. This is part of a larger communication strategy that is building on her “D, E, F” (demystifying, empowering, and moving forward) agenda presented in All of Us. This online course will be a pilot experiment in “mass collaborations” and is open to activists, non-profits, PLHA, advocates, civil society, academicians, teachers, classrooms, and all students. Dr. Mehret Mandefro is announcing the initiative on a panel about the links between violence against women and HIV at the United States Conference on AIDS, September 19, 2008 at 2:30 p.m.
The course is a social learning experiment. “Mass collaborations” are about movement building on a new scale and learning how to move thinking and discussion about health risk beyond individuals. All participants are experts and as an expert the task is to “do something” in the real world. The core component of the strategy is documentation of participation and the prime medium is digital media. The tradition of documentation runs deep in the human rights community. Groups like Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) represent a standard and a format for how this is done, but this course will do it a little different.
The format is a never-ending series that documents participants’ actions towards creating a collective consciousness. Acceptable formats for the documentation are: photo essays, video narratives, “truth circles”, blog posts and other viral web 2.0 tools. Our objective is to begin to connect the silos of HIV prevention across MSM, ex-offenders, minorities, women, and youth populations. The learning objectives of this course are: to study, describe, and identify the principles needed for mass collaboration to operate efficiently. How do we work together in an equitable manner that not only facilitates participation but also translates to impact on a community level? Long term learning objectives include: building trust, learning how to communicate about societal determinants of health, and creating connections across divides that move us beyond identity and into “human rights land”. If students achieve these goals, they will be granted a degree of freedom from the University of Orange, which is a project of the Community Research Group at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
Far fetched… perhaps? But like Dr. Mehret’s attempts at getting the grant in All of Us, “why not try?” This project is about making a collective leap of faith into a new era of HIV prevention and messaging that takes us way beyond condoms. The implications reach beyond AIDS. The name TruthAIDS is a double-entendre. Telling the truth is not only important for HIV, it is important in order to advance the work of social justice.
When Emily Abt, Director of All of Us, asked Dr. Mehret Mandefro to come up with the one line tag for the film that initially bore her name and followed her work, Dr. Mandefro quoted the poet Muriel Rukeyser who said: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” The answer Rukeyser presents to the question is: “The world would split open.”
Race, gender, class, place, and violence are at the heart of this epidemic and this affects us all. This is why we must all do the work of mass collaboration in hopes of seeing what is yet unseen, telling what is yet untold, and understanding what our current frameworks obscure. If we get it right, the United States will learn from past mistakes and have a prevention model of care that operates to keep communities healthy.
To contact Dr. Mehret Mandefro, please visit her blog at: drmehretmandefro.com, and register via email. She is constantly online, and connected. Alternatively, register at: http://www.truthaids.org or subscribe to: youtube.com/truthaids