With a title that sums it up so well, “We Were Here” is the story of a community fighting a force that threatened to annhilate it.
Thirty years since the mysterious “gay cancer” was first reported, director David Weissman’s second feature documentary follows the moving and intimate stories of five San Franciscans who experienced the epidemic from its onset to the present.
Also read: Outfest 2011: Highlights of This Year's Festival
A survivor of the epidemic himself, Weissman looked to his community for interviewees. “I knew I would need characters audiences couldn’t help but love,” he said in a post-screening Q&A at Outfest on Saturday.
One such person is Ed Wolf, who just couldn’t seem to find his niche in the late-1970’s San Francisco gay scene. He shares being unable to grasp the sexy looks he saw other gay men sending one another before hooking up.
Finding that his thoughtfulness and sensitivity actually serving him well as a hospital and AIDS counseling volunteer, Wolf, along with a political activist, an artist, a florist, and a frontline nurse, share their experiences finding themselves thrown into a war zone of illness.
Guy Clark sat on the corner by his flower stand every day watching passers-by grow increasingly weak until they would literally waste away. Daniel Goldstein bowed out of an extremely taxing experimental drug trial, which ended up killing every participant, including his lover, who saw it through. The film shares the voices of the living, but just as importantly shares those of the dead.
A focus on the social rather than the scientific ramifications of the disease, Weissman shows how residents of San Francisco's Castro district renegotiated community and the fight for sexual freedom and intimacy that brought them to the Bay Area in the first place. He also lovingly shares the significant contributions lesbians made to the health of gay men, despite the fact that the gay community often elevates masculinity and tacitly accepts misogyny.
"I knew I wanted to do it with simplicity and dignity and without a lot of emotional manipulation," said Weissman, who moved to San Francisco in 1976. "I knew during the epidemic … that there would come a point with this epidemic that if any of us survived, we would need … to tell stories."
In using such a small number of interviews, Weissman draws his audience into the energy of late 20th century gay life in San Francisco and the impending crisis. Yet at the Outfest screening on Saturday, the reality and memory of AIDS was as much in the room as it was onscreen.
During the Q&A, a silver-haired woman stood up to thank Weissman for the moments of pause he provided the audience during moments of almost unbearable emotional intensity. For example, we see Goldstein struggling to share his last moments with his lover, and when he takes a huge breath, the audience takes one along with him.
