Positive Youth

By: Robert O'Neill
In-House Review - Jul 31 2012

Charlie David steps behind the camera and makes his directorial debut with this moving, heartfelt and ultimately uplifting documentary. Positive Youth follows four young people in Vancouver who have been diagnosed with HIV - 25-year-old Jesse, 24-year-old Chris, 27-year-old Austin and 18-year-old Rakiya. Through interviews with his subjects, their family, their friends and numerous experts working with HIV treatment and prevention, the film examines how being HIV positive today means something completely different from what it meant during the tragic and tumultuous 1980s. When these young folks were first diagnosed, numerous scary questions ran through their heads ? "How am I going to tell my family?" "Is the disease going to be visible?" "Who is going to love me now?" "Am I going to die?" However, once they were educated about the proper steps necessary for living with HIV, those frightening questions began to fade. This film aims to get the message out that, in this day and age, living with HIV does not necessarily mean you will have AIDS ? that, in fact, you can live a long, happy, completely normal life with the right precautions. The optimism and positive attitudes of the people in this film are truly moving. Chris Brooks puts it best when he says "there is no point in being down, there is no point in crying ? just live, laugh and love."

By: Amos Lassen

Sometimes I think that we in the gay community have forgotten about AIDS. I am not saying that we have forgotten about those people that we have loved and lost to the terrible disease. I think that we have forgotten that there is no cure and AIDS is still a horrible menace that takes lives every day. While it has moved out of our community that does not mean that it is over or that we can be lax about it. Charlie David, the actor who made himself a name with films such as "Dante's Cove", "Judas Kiss" and others reminds us in his documentary about young people and AIDS that the disease is very much still with us. In 1981, AIDS killed but today this is not true. There is still no cure but such advances have been made in both science and medicine, that people are now able to not only live with the disease bit they can actually have a life of quality.

In this documentary, Charlie David looks at four different people who are HIV positive. There is a straight 18 year old woman, a member of First Nations who lives in rural and poor America. We meet a 25 year old white gay male who lives in urban America, a 23 year old religious African American and a club kid who is 27. What these people have in common is AIDS and we hear from each of them as to how they deal with the reality of living with the disease and how each of them has the ability to change opinions about AIDS.

This is a very important film and what we see here is inspirational. We must remain aware and vigilant so that we can arrest as much of the disease as powerful and give hope to those who have it. Most important is that it s never too late to learn about AIDS and we must never ever forget. Living with HIV/AIDS is living and we never want to consider the alternative again.