The Other City: The Reality of HIV Among Our Most Vulnerable Populations

[angi_is_altered]

There is a powerful new documentary circulating on the independent film front. The Other City showcases the lives of people living with HIV in the inner-city of Washington, D.C. This important and profound film portrays the reality of the lives of the city's most vulnerable citizens.

There are many major themes that are examined, including poverty,

Comments

[aujourlejour]

Wow, I'm going to have to see this. I was honestly blown away by the statistics in the third paragraph.

[persiascarecrow]

it's great they have a movie about this. hiv is a huge problem in dc. when people think of dc they think of monuments and memorials and the smithsonian but there's so much more to it. i will be watching for sure.

[emesieremonde]

ugh IA!

[actourdreams]

The idea of the wealthy comment, at least as I took it, was that there's so much money in this country, we should be able to spread it around more evenly (lol, I know I said spread the wealth).

But... progressive? Yeah not so much.

[roseofjuly]

That's the point.

[emesieremonde]

This is why I don't understand why people in West are so quick to go abroad and "Save Africa" from HIV/AIDS. We clearly haven't figured out how to help our own citizens in the U.S. and reduce the numbers of people getting infected. These statistics are worse than I thought :(

[roseofjuly]

Not to mention that our "Save Africa from HIV" programs are shitty a lot of times. Instead of sending people over there to do needs assessments, we just dump money on African countries (assuming that they have an infrastructure to distribute this where it needs to go) or we transport Western values and beliefs - particularly conservative Western values and beliefs, like the stupid ABC (abstinence, be faithful, condoms if necessary) program the Bush administration thought was a good idea.

ABC doesn't really work when you're a woman who needs to be married in order to survive and your husband is a truck driver who has sex with other women on the road but refuse to use a condom; or when you're a sex worker who needs to not use condoms to get paid more; or when you get raped; or when you don't have access to condoms...

[roseofjuly]

They do. On average, people living with HIV in the U.S. have more access to anti-retroviral treatment than people in African nations, and that combined with our better average medical treatment and average better nutrition means a long lifespan. So I see what you're getting at - the higher percentages may be because people are living longer with HIV