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We Were Here

New Video / Year: 2011

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Synopsis

We Were Here documents the coming of what was called the "Gay Plague" in the early 1980s, focusing on 5 individuals – all of 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, researchers, as friends and lovers of the afflicted, and 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, a window into the compassionate and courageous community response to the suffering and loss that followed, and—in a very visceral sense—the horrors of the disease itself. As a filmmaker and political activist who arrived in San Francisco in 1976 and was deeply impacted by the epidemic, director David Weissman brings a unique personal understanding to this history.

3 Reasons To buy this film

We Were Here was nominated for "Best Documentary" at the Independent Spirit Awards.
This deeply heartfelt (and heartwrenching) documentary shines a light of how HIV and AIDS changed the face of the San Francisco gay community in both positive and negative ways.
David Weissman and Bill Weber are the same acclaimed filmmakers behind The Cockettes.

Customer Reviews

“A Deeply Affecting Documentary about the AIDS Epidemic”

Amos Lassen wrote on 04/30/2012:

AIDS has been our Holocaust and director David Weissman brings us a “fresh and personal perspective” on the disease that robbed us of so many of our community. The impact of AIDS was devastating and to give us an idea how our community was decimated, Weismann focuses on five people who outlived the epidemic and they tell us what the years that AIDS destroyed us were like.

Each of the five represents a different aspect of the AIDS plague. Guy Clark, an African American, came to San Francisco as a dancer and began running a flower shop in the Castro and form his shop came too many flower arrangements for funerals of those we lost to AIDS, Paul Boneberg was more of a political activist, Ellen Glutzer was a nurse who lost many patients to the disease and who, at her gay friends’ requests helped with clinical trials of several AIDS drugs, Daniel Goldstein is HIV positive and an artist who lost two lovers to the disease and “Ed Wolf who remained healthy because, as he says, “I was terrible at anonymous sex,” but he worked as a counselor to many dying men”.

From these five people we learn what San Francisco was like in the 1970’s when Milk organized the gay community. It was then that the first signs of the disease that would change so many of us first appeared. They do this through news footage and photographs in addition to what they have to say and this is where the film soars. Listening to the testimony of the five as they speak and express emotion lets us really know what was going on. As they cry, we cry but the tears we shed are not depressing—rather they affirm who we are, what we have been through and the high price we paid.

AIDS decimated us but it also brought us together and our community was transformed as we lost more and more members. We see here that San Francisco awoke from the hedonistic gay lifestyle that had been going on and compassion replaced the “I don’t give a damn” attitude. Straight people came forward to help and attitudes toward homosexuality changed. The memories that are shared here are not always pleasant but they are real and they are painful but above all they are honest and because of that, the film helps us to heal. I still think of the many friends that I lost but the younger generation has no idea of what we went through. AIDS changed us forever and we must always remember that the advances that we have made today were able to be made because of those that came before. Many of them never got to experience the freedom that we now have and that is too bad. We owe them so much.