We Were Here (2012)
Although We Were Here could be caught at a few cinemas earlier this year, lots of us were able to see it on iplayer and on TV when word of mouth spread about it; which it did, and fast. As a film it is knockout moving, remembering the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and telling the story of the gay Castro District from the early 1970s to the late 1980s.
It’s an intense documentary and you can’t help but be moved. What makes it work are the people interviewed, and they start their stories before the epidemic, talking about how this amazing community began and was built. The Castro was and still is the biggest gay community in the USA, and David Weissman’s film is really more about this place and its people, than it is a retrospective and the disaster of the 1980s epidemic.
The Castro really came alive following the Summer of Love in the neighbouring Haight-Ashbury district in 1967, and many San Francisco gays had moved there by the early 1970, because fine Victorian houses were available because their former middle-class owners had rushed off to the suburbs to escape the flower power crowd.
In 1973, Harvey Milk opened a camera store here, Castro Camera, and he began political involvement as a gay activist, and basically this cohered the neighbourhood into the marvel it became.
Watching We Were Here, you are very much involved in the process of how this came apart. One of the main narrators Ed Wolf, really sums up the suddenness of AIDS with a story about seeing some photos in a pharmacy window about 1980. A man with terrible red sores had posted photos of himself with a message saying as plain as: ‘watch out guys there’s something going about.’
The photographs haunted him while he went to the cinema with his partner that evening, and his partner was one of many in the area that night who were already infected.
Even by then, when nobody had heard of AIDS, it was too late for thousands. The depths of mourning that the survivors display in David Weissman’s film is staggering; everybody it seemed had an overwhelming percentage of their friends, colleagues and neighbours wiped out in this awful manner.
From all this comes great good, and although you will definitely be surprised, no matter how much you think you know about the epidemic, you do feel moved and not destroyed afterwards, having helped in a strange way by doing your part in the sharing; it’s all a part of the healing and there was and still is, a hell of a lot needed in this case.